General election: We better hope Boris Johnson is more caring than TV interview suggests – leader comment

Boris Johnson’s attempt to respond to picture of sick four-year-old boy – lying on the floor of a Leeds hospital because of a lack of beds – with bland slogans was a mistake.
Boris Johnson did eventually look at a photograph of a four-year-old boy with suspected pneumonia sleeping on the floor in a hospital because of a shortage of beds on the phone of ITV reporter Joe Pike, after initially putting it in his pocket (Picture: ITV/PA Wire)Boris Johnson did eventually look at a photograph of a four-year-old boy with suspected pneumonia sleeping on the floor in a hospital because of a shortage of beds on the phone of ITV reporter Joe Pike, after initially putting it in his pocket (Picture: ITV/PA Wire)
Boris Johnson did eventually look at a photograph of a four-year-old boy with suspected pneumonia sleeping on the floor in a hospital because of a shortage of beds on the phone of ITV reporter Joe Pike, after initially putting it in his pocket (Picture: ITV/PA Wire)

Amid discussions about multi-billion-pound government spending plans, tax rises and cuts, and the economic and geopolitical fallout from Brexit, it is perhaps easy to forget that politics is personal, that the decisions taken in the corridors of power can have a very real impact on the lives on individual citizens.

Governments do have to take decisions about extremely serious issues – like going to war, for example – that will have profound consequences for the people involved and, while it is easy to criticise, it is much harder to make the right call in circumstances where every choice seems like a bad one.

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But it is important for the public to have confidence that their leaders are taking these weighty decisions with the real-world impact of them at the forefront of their minds.

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'Heartless' Boris Johnson takes reporter's phone after refusing to look at photo...

Regrettably, Boris Johnson’s attempt to dismiss a photograph of a sick four-year-old boy forced to sleep on the floor of a hospital because his bed was needed for another patient at least suggests that he isn’t particularly interested.

His decision to attempt to bluster his way through a TV interview – in which he put the journalist’s phone in his pocket to avoid talking about the photo – by rattling off vague party political slogans about “taking this country forward” and the danger of a “government mired in more deadlock, more disarray and unable to move forward” seemed a lazy response.

Jeremy Corbyn and other opposition politician said it showed he simply did not care; Anna Soubry, a former Conservative MP who now leads the Independent Group for Change, described his actions as “appalling”.

The SNP’s Ian Blackford said Johnson was “a man with no empathy and no moral compass”. And while they would say that, Johnson should have been smart enough to have realised his actions would be exploited.

If not, this raises the prospect of the long-term re-election of a Prime Minister who is lazy, stupid, lacking in compassion and who has a problematic definition of the truth, as has been noted by several commentators across the political spectrum.

That the Labour leader may be equally unsuitable for the highest office in the land, given doubts over his economic competence and concern about anti-semitism within his party, is no comfort to anyone.

Given he looks set to win, we can only hope the real Johnson is different to the rather robotic performance displayed in this one interview.