Leadership can be lonely. So this Valentines Day, we thought we’d take a look at leaders who have found love with other leaders.
Antony and Cleopatra
Nobody would recommend Antony and Cleopatra as a model for a healthy relationship but it was certainly entertaining.
He was a military leader of Rome and she was the Queen of Egypt. They had so much in common. But, according to Shakespeare and other historians, their love would bring about their downfall and lead, ultimately, to a joint-suicide. Prior to all of this, Cleopatra had a child with Antony’s best mate Julius Caesar.
So no, this pair probably aren’t the ideal when it comes to leaders in love.
Eva and Juan Perón
Slightly less tragic (but only slightly), and quite a lot more successful, is the Argentinian pair Eva and Juan Peron.
When Juan was elected president of Argentina in 1946, Eva quit her job as an actress and committed herself full-time to pushing labour reforms, addressing poverty, and improving public health.
She wanted to become vice president but, six years into Juan’s time in office, she became ill and died. Her death was marked with a full state funeral and she is now immortalised for all time thanks to Madonna.
However, while the Perons did bring many benefits to the country, their regime has been criticised for its authoritarian nature. Political opponents were jailed and the freedoms of the press curtailed. After Eva’s death, Juan’s popularity nosedived and he was ousted in a military coup three years later.
But in 1973 he came back with another leader/lover by his side. Isabel de Martinez Peron, his third wife, was elected as Vice President and, after Juan died, she became Argentina’s first female president.
Juan certainly had a type.
Mao Tse-Tung and Jiang Qing
We’re getting really romantic now, aren’t we?
Everyone knows about that loveable teddy bear Mao Tse-Tung whose ‘great leap forward’ was responsible for 40-80 million deaths. But not everyone is aware of the influential role played by his forth wife, Jiang Qing.
As a formal head of power in the Chinese Communist Party, Qing set about dismantling political opponents and the so-called intellectual and artistic elite.
‘I was Chairman Mao's dog,’ she said during trial after Mao's death. ‘Whoever he told me to bite, I bit.’
If you need something to write in your Valentines’ Day card, you can have that one for free.
Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron
You’ll be pleased to learn that our penultimate pair are still with us today, although they are no longer with each other and haven’t been for over thirty years.
Both Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron are highly-acclaimed Oscar-winning film directors. And in 2010, they famously went head to head in the Academy Award categories of ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, with Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker facing off against Cameron’s Avatar.
When Bigelow won both awards, Cameron was magnanimous in defeat, saying he would ‘be feeling like shit’ if he had pipped her to the prizes. What he didn’t say was how he actually felt having failed to do so.
Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls
Finally, we’ll end much closer to home and on a significantly more positive note than any of the tales told above.
In 2008, Labour politicians Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls became the first married couple in history to appear in a government cabinet.
Cooper remains in frontline politics as Labour’s shadow Home Secretary, while Balls is a much-loved television presenter and occasional contributor to The Leaders Council’s online webinars.
They recently celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, which proves, despite some of the evidence in this article, that two leaders really can fall in love without destroying either themselves, their country, or both.
Then again, they were only in cabinet together for two years.
Join us at a coffee morning
And if you’re a leader looking to meet other leaders (to find love and/or some decent networking opportunities), get in touch about attending one of our regular coffee mornings, attended by Leaders Council members and our chairman Lord Blunkett:
https://www.leaderscouncil.co.uk/apply
Photo by Mayur Gala on Unsplash
