Tory PM flinches and flounders under onslaught from angry father whose daughter almost died on understaffed ward

A staged Boris Johnson photo opportunity has blown up in the Tory PM’s face when an angry father, whose daughter had just almost died on an understaffed NHS ward, laid into him on camera.

To the obvious consternation of the hospital or campaign manager accompanying Johnson, the livid dad refused to be mollified by Johnson’s stammering attempts to deflect him – and reacted with scorn when Johnson tried to claim there were no press present:

What do you mean there’s no press? Who are these people?!

The outraged parent hit Johnson with the truth of the NHS under the Tories: two wards – a children’s ward and a neonatal unit for sick babies – with only a single registrar stretched between them and a dire lack of nurses and other medical staff.

And Johnson scarcely knew where to put himself:

Boris Johnson’s man-of-the-people act is paper-thin at the best of times – but confronted with the desperate, real-life consequences of the actions and policies he has wholeheartedly supported all his political life, the veneer tore and his vacuum of real nature showed through.

This should be the defining moment of the not-yet-official general election campaign. The Johnson myth, carefully constructed by him and his handler Dominic Cummings, does not survive contact with what really matters to all of us: the reality of the tattered, flogged-off and stripped-down structures and services on which our lives and the lives of our loved ones depend.

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