Leadership Quote by John Hewson

Exhaustion is the only admission here, and it’s doing a lot of political work. Hewson offers a bodily, human explanation for collapse while carefully refusing the stigma-loaded label the media wants to pin on him. “Absolutely exhausted” sounds ordinary, even virtuous in a public figure: the fatigue of duty. “Nervous breakdown,” by contrast, is the tabloid diagnosis that turns strain into spectacle and unreliability. He doesn’t argue the details; he reframes the entire episode as a contest over narrative authority.

The line “All that stuff I just took as people taking the opportunity when you're down to give you a kick” is defensive, but also strategic. It casts critics as opportunists rather than truth-tellers, and it positions him as the target of a familiar political ritual: piling on when someone shows weakness. Notice the passive construction of “the media said” versus the active moral judgment of “people…give you a kick.” The first is presented as rumor; the second as cruelty. That shift invites the audience to stop asking “what happened to him?” and start asking “why are they doing this to him?”

Context matters: politicians are expected to be tireless machines, yet are punished for seeming machine-like. Hewson’s phrasing tries to thread that needle - enough vulnerability to feel real, enough indignation to keep authority intact. The subtext is blunt: my opponents want you to confuse human limits with unfitness to lead.