It's hard to know which is the more compelling: the contrasting photographs of a 50-year-old Tony Blair, showing the vital, bright-eyed man of just seven years ago to have morphed into a desperately gaunt, grey-faced creature; or the before-and-after pictures of the famously scary-looking Gen Sir Michael Jackson, he of the craggy features and heavily hooded but now astonishingly more alert-looking eyelids.
Something is surely stirring out there when "Macho Jacko", the former NATO Kfor commander in Kosovo, and once gung-go army captain now being forced to account for some odd omissions from his report on the Bloody Sunday shootings, feels obliged to have a little work done on his face at the age of 59. Is he a one-off or the very model of a modern major general?
Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph reports "friends" of Blair, to say that "he's gone a bit extreme about what he eats" and is "a bit too obsessed by his weight".
Before 1997, when he made it to Downing Street, he and Alistair Campbell thought the gym was for wimps. Now he works out on a treadmill and rowing machine, runs around the tennis court "like a raving lunatic", and bounces around on a trampoline with Leo, while Campbell runs the London Marathon.
Blair has turned himself into a model of health and virility (remember the fuss over baby Leo and Cherie's miscarriage?) just as Western culture demands. He doesn't smoke and limits himself to a few glasses of wine. He eats fish by the tank-full and his idea of a take-away is a buffalo mozzarella salad. At 50, he is a stone lighter than he was at 40.
Then suddenly, he suffers a minor heart problem and the political obituarists rush into print. For a man with such an acute awareness of image, he is no doubt, grateful for one thing: his little turn was not captured on camera.
Never mind the medical consensus that it was probably a one-off. In a Western world that fetishes youth, health and photogenic qualities in its politicians, to have it on film would probably have been the fatal blow to a weakened Prime Minister. The sight of George Bush snr vomiting into his host's lap at a Japanese state banquet 11 years ago signalled his presidency's final decline. It is why a custard pie slapped in Michael Noonan's face, however unavoidable and humorously handled, had such a lethal effect on his image and why burly Bertie Ahern likes to be filmed kicking a ball around, however ineptly.
Politicians understand instinctively that to the mass of voters, political power is inextricably linked with personal strength.
It's nothing new. Over 40 years ago, John F. Kennedy went to extraordinary lengths to conceal his desperate ill-health.
It explains why big Bill Clinton's voracious appetite for women and doughnuts hardly dented his support base. Why Bush jnr likes to play at war in Top Gun gear. And why the chilly Grey Davies never had a prayer against Arnold Schwarzeneggar.
In the last US election, Naomi Wolf was called in by the Gore camp with a brief to transmogrify the tree-hugging candidate into an alpha male. Though much-mocked, there was sound, tactical realism behind it.
Perhaps it's proof, says the commentator Jonathan Freedland, of the extent to which politics is a primal, visceral business. We expect the tribal chief to be the strongest in the pack, an alpha usually-male who gives off the scent of raw physical power. "There is a subtext of male violence running through all politics," Freedland was told by one US Democratic speechwriter. Anyone who has attended the odd pre-nomination cumann meeting or recalls the black and white television images of a fratricidal Fianna Fáil in the early 1980s will attest to that.
But the savagery of the political game was exposed this week when Tony Blair felt unable to take a day off work after what must have been a shocking wake-up call not only for him, but for his wife and family. While some voters coldly declared that if he isn't up to the job, he should be pensioned off like everyone else, others saw his ridiculously swift return to work as an indicator of New Labour's true feelings about the work-life balance.
Sixty years ago, it has been pointed out, Britain was brought through five years of total war by an old man who, while in office, suffered a heart attack, pneumonia, heart fibrillation, you name it. Would Churchill have got past even the starting post with today's media and voters?
Meanwhile, by the cruellest of timings, Tony Blair's great rival, a beaming, doe-eyed Gordon Brown, is making the front pages, cuddling and kissing his newborn baby.
Suddenly Brown, once the synonym for dourness and prudence, is the Man. "I'm a father and that's what matters most," he declares. "Nothing matters more than that. Nothing."
No doubt, he means every word of it. We'll see.