Election 2019: Bad start for Johnson as he’s booed out of Addenbrooke’s hospital
Thick(-skinned): Boris Johnson smiled his way through his visit to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge – even, one suspects, as staff and patients were booing him out.
Why does Boris Johnson still think it’s good electioneering to make appearances in hospitals?
Everyone knows he hates the National Health Service and using it as a backdrop for other unpopular campaigning doesn’t help him.
Today (October 31) was the day he promised, “do or die”, that the UK would leave the European Union. It hasn’t. But he turned up at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge to tell nurses that, if elected, then the new Brexit deadline would be in January next year at the latest.
It shows a particularly rough form of insensitivity to keep denying reality in this way.
People don’t want his Brexit. They want a reasonable deal that won’t shrink the economy by 3.5 per cent (equivalent to a loss of thousands of pounds per year for UK households). They want to save money by withdrawing from the EU – as he claimed would happen to the tune of £350m per week in 2016, and not to spend £500m a week on medicines for the NHS in a frankly bewildering deal with the US that would harm us all.
And today, they wanted him out of Addenbrooke’s Hospital. He left to boos and other sounds of derision (as you can see here).
Elsewhere, he was accused of withholding information on Russian interference in the UK democratic process – material that, it was argued, should be available to the public in the run-up to an election.
Oh, and it could also be argued that he spoke inappropriately to children at a primary school in Bury St Edmonds when he told them that enemies of the state used to have their heads chopped off and put on spikes on London Bridge. Did the parents know he was going to put this grisly thought in the minds of impressionable youngsters on Hallowe’en?
All in all, it could hardly have been a worse start for the unelected prime minister.
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Labour promises 4 more days of statutory holiday per year. Nowhere near a lot of other European countries but a good start.
I propose that one should be a Bank Holiday on 31st October called “Drag the ditches Day”
Just as Guy Fawkes Day involves burning an effigy, Drag the Ditches Day would involve an effigy of Johnson being dragged out of any suitable water body, eg a village pond, a roadside ditch, the local canal etc
Excited crowds would chant the traditional rhyme “Is it Boris, is he dead? Is it something that he said?”
They would then be asked “Well, which is it?” and they would all shout out their preference “Alive….no,dead….”etc until all dissolve into laughter and retire to the pub for glasses of mead, real ale or mulled wine, that sort of thing.
I would start organising a Drag the Ditches Day immediately, but we have already started campaigning to win the seat for Labour so the new ancient tradition will have to wait.
What a great idea!