As a young man he was the chubby playboy. In middle age he was a portly bon viveur. At his latest public appearance yesterday Kim Jong Il, the supreme leader of North Korea, was deathly — a scrawny, gaunt, almost skeletal figure whose appearance can only add to international anxiety about the future of the world’s most isolated nuclear state.
The skin hung slack around his jaws and neck and he walked with the limp that was in evidence at his last public appearance — the opening of North Korea’s tame parliament in April.
It was clear then that Mr Kim had suffered an episode of severe ill health, apparently a stroke in August that removed him from public view for months. To judge from