The House Opinion Article | The Professor Will See You Now: Sleep

Illustration by Tracy Worrall

4 min read22 min

There was a night, many years ago, when I was drifting off to sleep listening to the radio and the last thing I heard before the land of nod was Geoff Hoon, on The World Tonight, doing a good job defending the indefensible. When the radio woke me up in the morning, there he was again, this time on the Today programme, still on a sticky wicket but batting with gusto.

The more critical of you might say that both falling asleep and waking up to Geoff Hoon is Too Much Hoon, and the sort of thing that only Mrs Hoon should experience, but he was then one of the university’s local MPs, always very helpful with student requests and the like, so there will be no cheap gags like this here. See it, instead, as a small and perhaps unremarkable example of the reservoirs of energy required by frontline politicians.

Ditto for the last day of April, which marked 21 years since I first appeared as an election night anorak. Election all-nighters, fuelled only by coffee and adrenaline, may be great fun for commentators and journalists – it’s one of the highlights of my year – but they seem much less enjoyable for politicians, many of whom have been campaigning for weeks before and would much rather feel a pillow beneath their head. Those whose parties are on the up at least get to enjoy the bragging rights, but the ones I’m always most impressed by are those who have got a right kicking from the electorate – ‘well, it’s certainly been a difficult night for us’ – but who are still there at 4am, fighting the good fight. 

Or take that bit in Doctor Who, when the Doctor manages to undermine Harriet Jones, the prime minister, by whispering the phrase “Doesn’t she look tired?” to one of her aides; those four words prove to be enough to cause her downfall. It’s much quoted, but implausible. Of course she looks tired! She’s the prime minister; they all look like that. Exhaustion is part of the job description. 

It’s less obvious that this is all a good thing. There are plenty of studies on how sleep deprivation lowers your cognitive abilities (although you don’t need an academic study to know this if you’ve been a parent). Bill Clinton once said that every important mistake he’d made in his life, he’d made because he was too tired – although he clearly wasn’t too tired for some of his mistakes. 

New research just published in Political Psychology has now also found a link between the quality of sleep and political participation. Based on European Social Survey data from 12 countries, including the UK, researchers found that individuals who report good sleep are more likely to vote, even after controlling for a range of other variables. Those who don’t are more likely to take part in non-electoral politics. The effects don’t appear consistently across countries, which implies something else might be going on, although they are found in the UK. 

The paper might be thought to slightly oversell itself by claiming that “creating societies where high-quality sleep is accessible to the public is vital to the sustainability of democratic regimes”, given that the size of the effects is relatively small; even if all were suffering cheese-inspired nightmares on a regular basis, turnout wouldn’t be all that much lower. Increased levels of education, for example, drive up turnout by roughly four to five times as much as improved sleep quality does. That, however, is just the direct effect. Sleep quality will also be working as a background factor, affecting many of the other variables that drive turnout, including education, health, and so on. ‘Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, And it makes you vote a bit more’. As Shakespeare could have written. 

Further reading: F Erol et al, Waking up to politics: How sleep quality relates to political participation, Political Psychology, 2026