Jeff Bezos, 35, chief executive of amazon.com, sleeps eight hours a night. Marc Andreesen, 27, Netscape founder and chief technology officer at America Online, gets eight-and-a-half hours. Richard Branson needs eight to function properly. Tony Blair has to catch up if he has a late night.
It's no shock that the high-powered have the same basic needs as the rest of us. What's new is that they are fulfilling them and falling over themselves to boast about it.
In the 1980s sleep was for slackers. Donald Trump slept three hours a night between parties and deals. Bill Gates said of Microsoft programmers: "They don't need much sleep. They will work 24 hours round the clock." Margaret Four Hours Thatcher may have saved her 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 latenighters as daft.
"The four-hours-a-night fad was hype, lies and absolute nonsense," says Lea. "Most directors average eight hours. They get in at 9.30 a.m., 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.
"John Major reckoned Margaret Thatcher cheated and had a rest for an hour during the day," says MP Edwina Currie. "He used to complain people expected four hours of him when he needed seven."
Currie, 53, used to get by on six hours. She now gets seven and her mother ( who is 80) says she's a much nicer person for it.
But there is a horrible smugness about the new refreshed executive. US anthropologist Lionel Tiger says that showing off about your eight hours is classic one-upmanship. "There is an implication in the `sleep-a-lot' boast that you are so well organised and such a neat delegator that the world can persist adequately even while you are comatose. This is a tribute to how splendid you are when you are not comatose."
Executive sleep indulgence is also fashionably health-conscious. "Sleep is the new wheat allergy," says anthropologist Kate Fox of the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford, England. "Bravado is out of fashion in the higher tiers of the workplace. Of course we're talking about the chattering classes. Working mothers don't have the luxury of sleeping for prestige."
The eight-hours-a-night brag by directors would be brilliant if it were accompanied by a nicer workplace which everyone left at 5 p.m. But it is not. If sleep is a status symbol, a class-system is emerging in which the slumber-rich snuggle down at the expense of their exhausted staff.
Many workers are sleeping less to ensure that their bosses get eight hours. When Richard Edelman, 44, head of the US firm Edelman Public Relations Worldwide, added his name to a Washington Post list of the latest eight-hour kipping executives, his vice-president Bob Ambrose, 51, came forward to say he got up at 3 a.m. every day to get to the office at 5.30 a.m. in order to read the newspapers and answer emails for Edelman. "Because I am here I can take some of the pressure off," he told the paper.
Simon Folkard, a specialist in shift-work fatigue, says there is evidence to suggest British workers are sleeping less than ever. Junior doctors still regularly sleep four-hour nights. One head-teacher admits to working until 3 a.m. and sleeping bolt upright in an armchair to ensure he wakes at seven. Judi James, a business consultant, has found in stress-management workshops that the average British office worker goes to bed at 11 and wakes at 3.30 a.m. worrying about work.
"The executive sleep brag is elitist behaviour," says James. "It makes me sick to think that these executives are putting their heads down on their goose-down pillows. If it's meant to make executives seem more human and caring it does the exact opposite. To claim that you can run a company and bring up a family and still be able to switch off and have a good eight hours is like saying you're superhuman. It's smug and irritating.
"Status-sleeping at a time when workers are chronically sleep-deprived is the equivalent of a slim person walking into a room full of porky people eating a cream bun."
James claims the tidal wave of kindness that is supposedly sweeping the workplace as a backlash to stress is a myth. "There's not a sniff of it on the ground," she says. "In fact the draconian work practices of the 1980s are only just beginning. Downsizing means that companies are working on skeleton crews. It is now acknowledged that if you beat a horse, you will get a lot of hard work out of it, but if you feed it and groom it, it will work for longer. But this is not a sign of charity. It's just because people are cracking up under pressure and payouts are expensive for companies."
The reality of the sleeping executives is also more complicated than they might like to show. Amazon's Jeff Bezos does not schedule morning meetings, so he can have a leisurely breakfast with his wife. But Bezos regularly works a 12-hour day which - combined with his breakfast needs and eight-hour sleep requirements - leaves little time for anything else. Branson admits that although he functions best on eight hours, he is often forced to get by on four to six. Trump is still going on his three hours. Martha Lane Fox, the co-founder of lastminute.com, has proudly told newspapers that she has four hours a night. Robert Bonnier, the chief executive of Scoot. com, can manage only six.
In his book Sleep Thieves, psychologist Stanley Coren says sleep requirement is a crucial factor in image management. Because of this, you can never be completely sure that anyone, especially those at the top, is honest about the hours they sleep. Coren has found evidence that da Vinci actually liked his bed and Samuel Johnson once said: "I have, all my life long, been lying (in bed) till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any good."
It will always be part of office politics to boast about being efficient with sleep, just as it is big to say you sleep a lot when no one else can afford to, Coren argues.
Sandi Mann, an occupational psychologist, explains that workers are comparing sleep hours over the photocopier because people are programmed to talk about what they don't get enough of: sleep and sex. "As the number of working parents grows, working mothers and modern fathers who see to their babies in the night are appreciating the need for what they don't have, and that's sleep."
Judi James says that because sleep is a rare commodity, competition is growing among chief executives to get it. But, sadly, it means nothing to the rest of us. "Sleep is part of a new power posture. But I've sat through enough ethical management talks to see that for mere mortals, sleep is still a campaigning issue."