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The relationship between a Prime Minister and the National Health Service is do or die.

The health of a PM's career is inextricably linked to that of the nation. If they care for the NHS, they care for us. If they don't do that, we die, and they'll soon find themselves short of voters.

Boris Johnson's relationship with the NHS is abusive. He has demanded more money for this grand old lady, using logic that collapsed in the time it took for someone to stick it on the side of a bus.

Despite the fact everyone knew £350m wasn't available for her upkeep, and never would be, he kept repeating the promise until the UK Statistics Authority sent him a stern letter requesting that he desist.

Perhaps resenting this black mark upon his character, perhaps in the belief that polishing it will render his many other flaws less visible, or perhaps because he is genuinely seeking to restore his reputation, Johnson has today promised £1.8bn for the NHS.

Not only is £1.8bn a bigger pile of money than £350m, it is also a bigger lie. An inverted pyramid of panhandling poo-bah, if you like.

(Image: Adam Gerrard/Daily Mirror)

1. The money doesn't exist

2. It's still not £350m a week

3. Even if it was, it's also not enough

But numbers, right? Let's hurl around some big numbers, millions, billions, hundreds of fizzillions, and it all goes in the headline, where people will just see the big numbers and think better of the man they persist in calling 'Boris'.

I hate maths, but not as much as I hate people lying. And if maths has one thing over words, it's that it cannot lie.

So let's take this one painful sum at a time.

(Image: PA Wire/PA Images)

When the Vote Leave campaign did its bus sums, it used a gross figure for the amount sent to the Eurpean Union as part of our membership.

It did not take into account the rebate for about a third of the total, which Margaret Thatcher had negotiated. And they didn't factor in those things the EU gave us in return - farm subsidies, infrastructure projects, bus stations and regional investment.

The claim was knocked down during the referendum campaign. It was proven false before, and immediately after, the vote. But a year later Johnson wrote again in his newspaper column: "Once we have settled our accounts, we will take back control of roughly £350 million per week. It would be a fine thing, as many of us have pointed out, if a lot of that money went on the NHS."

This assumes we will give the EU the £39bn we owe. Which if we do not pay, it will demand in a future trade agreement. And which, for his latest sums, he has pretended is in his pocket. But the billions Johnson has recently promised for police officers, hospitals and schools are billions he has no control of.

(Image: Getty Images Europe)

The real figure we spent on the EU is nearer £250m a week . And it will be dwarfed by the economic cost of any sort of Brexit, estimated at anywhere from 3% of GDP with a deal, to 10% without one.

In other words, it will cost a minimum of £1.9bn a week - a deficit 5.4 times greater than the profit we were promised.

Added to all this is the fact that the money Johnson is pledging isn't real. It includes £1bn the hospitals already have, and which they got only by making cuts to services that amounted to more. After which, they were told not to spend it, which made those cuts effectively greater still.

All that Johnson has done is tell a small proportion of hospitals they can spend money they earned as a result of losing a larger amount of money.

His £1.8bn cash injection could therefore be more accurately described as a multi-billion pound cash EXTRACTION. A cash-ectomy, if you like.

(Image: Christopher Furlong)

Then we have the revelations this weekend that the Tories have swiped £4.2bn from NHS maintenance budgets to pay wages.

The absence of spending on buildings means the repairs that were needed have got worse, and will now cost £6bn.

On top of all that is the £30bn a year black hole in NHS spending, the lack of a national social care service, 100,000 vacancies and migrant NHS staff departing these shores at unprecedented levels because of Johnson's dodgy, undemocratic, and as-yet unsuccessful referendum.

If you look at Johnson's dealings with the NHS, his empty promise of £1.8bn must be compared to a minimum £151bn he and the government he was part of have taken from the NHS.

Or, in simpler terms, the Prime Minister has cost our health service at least 83 TIMES what he has promised to give it.

(Image: Getty)

Throw in the harm any sort of Brexit will do to the economy at least in the short term, and you can multiply that by many billions more that should have been available for NHS spending and will instead be lost in tariff subsidies, a mass slaughter of the lambs and an inevitable rerun of the austerity we all hoped was over.

If Boris Johnson's relationship with his mother followed the same pattern as that with the NHS, he would have persuaded her to abandon her pension, personally brought down the government he wanted to write her a cheque instead, and increased his own spending to the point where the only solution was to steal money from his mother's purse.

Now it is finally his job to provide the money, he's found a few pennies down the back of the sofa that his mother had lost already and presented them with a showman's flourish.

An act which should merit calling the police, not a thank you.

(Image: REUTERS)

He expects this to restore his reputation. He expects it to bring him votes.

Anyone who thinks better of a son for treating his mother this way is a fool. Anyone who thinks better of someone treating THEIR mother like this would be a matricidal maniac.

And any voter who thinks better of a Prime Minister who behaves in this manner towards the NHS in which we are all birthed, bandaged, scanned, screened and saved on a daily basis, is asking for an earlier, grubbier, and more painful death. It was bad enough before Brexit, but with Boris Johnson's input, we'll soon be screaming blue murder.

He said Brexit was a matter of do or die. So this is the easiest maths of all - if we Brexit, he's toast.