Thatcher may have saved her own life by staying up to work on her speech on the night of the Brighton bombing. Company directors were reminded that Leonardo da Vinci slept 15 minutes every four hours and that Napoleon, Voltaire, Edison and Churchill barely slept at all. Last month the Wall Street Journal called sleep the new status symbol. At a time when most people complain that they stay at work too late, it's now a sign of class to refuse to sacrifice your normal brain function to the 24-hour industrial beast. Sleep snobs are dismissing the late-nighters as daft.
Most directors average eight hours.
They get in at 9.30 am, work very hard and go home. Lately I have found that directors aren't complaining about sleep. They are sensible, normal people who try to get as much as they need. There is also the suggestion that the four-hours boast of the 1980s may have been a slight exaggeration. She now gets seven and her mother, who is 80, says she's a much nicer person for it.