Boris Johnson ambushed with '£350m-for-NHS' cheque

Foreign Secretary insists reporter's offer is a 'pointless stunt'

Boris Johnson is confronted by Sky News' Darren McCaffrey (Screengrab/Sky News)

Boris Johnson was ambushed by Sky News reporter Darren McCaffrey at Conservative Party conference, and asked to sign a giant cheque for £350m, made out to the NHS.

This, you may recall, is the amount Vote Leave promised would be free to send to the NHS when the UK exited the EU.

The Foreign Secretary, unsurprisingly, refused to sign the cheque, and when asked why, he said: "Because you’re doing a pointless stunt, that’s why."

If such £350m-cheque based stunts are so pointless, we do have to wonder why, on the campaign trail in mid-May, Mr Johnson donned hi-viz in order to smelt a large metal cheque of the same amount.

And also why, a week earlier, he had taken an angle grinder to seventeen sheets of rolled steel, spelling out “£350,000,000 per week.”

Mr Johnson was not the only reluctant cheque signer. McCaffrey also presented the cheque to Andrea Leadsom, Iain Duncan Smith, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel. It remains unsigned.