Boris Johnson’s squeamishness about what his own party is doing to the NHS couldn’t look worse for the Tories

It may not lose the election for him, but it has been an unwelcome reminder of what is going on ‘out there’, and why getting Brexit done isn’t necessarily at the top of everyone’s agenda

Whatever else, the “optics”, as party image managers like to call them, were as appalling as the case itself. The prime minister, out and about, looked as shifty as a shoplifter when the ITV reporter asked him to return his mobile phone, which Boris Johnson had slipped into his coat pocket rather than confront the image of a four-year-old boy forced to lie on the floor of an NHS hospital in Leeds.

Eventually, rumbled and on camera, the man entrusted with the Queen’s government fished out the smartphone, took a look at the plight of Jack Williment-Barr, and apologised. A standard Johnson dodge to try and get the conversation moved onto Brexit had failed in the most miserable way possible. The footage has the feel of a mask slipping. The damage is done, and not least because the case of Jack is not so unusual.

We report today on a 12-year-old girl who has waited more than 50 hours in a hospital’s A&E department – this time at the Mid Essex Hospital. Separately, a child waited 17 hours at Birmingham Children’s Hospital.

There are more human faces to be put on the stats about NHS waiting lists we hear so much about. Saying that waiting lists or times are at a record high, by some metric or other and in one or more of the four nations of the UK, doesn’t necessarily appal the public as it should.

Unfortunately, the sheer frequency and repetition of such dismal record-breaking numbers, and their politicisation, tends to inure the public to their impact. A four-year-old in Spider-Man pyjamas on the floor cannot be just spun away like a question in the Commons. It makes the soundbite-ridden, slogan-infested complacent pleas from Matt Hancock, the health and social care secretary, sound as hollow and as cynical as they are.

The fact is the NHS has had to put up with a prolonged period when its funding and efficiency gains have failed to keep pace with ever-rising demand. Perhaps it was necessary during the era of austerity to help repair the public finances, or maybe it was an ideologically driven mission to engineer a smaller state and part-privatisation of the service.

Either way, it remains an unacknowledged fact on the part of ministers and the shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth equally. There are tough choices to be made by the voters about health in the post-Brexit era of lower economic growth and lower migration of skilled and unskilled labour supporting the NHS. No-one is asking the public to make them.

There have been similar turning points – or putative ones – in election campaigns before. The Labour Party tried to humanise the debate about the future of the NHS in the 1992 election, with a party election broadcast about a little girl needing treatment for deafness. The “war of Jennifer’s ear” as it came to be known ended up mired in a row about who had leaked the details, and how the Labour party had, allegedly, placed a misleading gloss on her story.

The arguments around Jack and the others will similarly range off target, but this time there is the added embarrassment of a prime minister on video who would rather not know about the reality of what had been done to the NHS by a Conservative government. To his limited credit, Mr Johnson did not choose to gabble his way through the usual semi-accurate claims about 40 new hospitals and thousands of “new” nurses. Instead, he looked sheepish, and a touch rattled.

It may not lose the election for him, but it has been an unwelcome reminder of what is going on “out there”, and why getting Brexit done, even if it were true, will be far from the end of the country’s troubles.