It was Sunday afternoon and I was just putting my roast spuds in when I got a message from Mike who was working in the office here at the Mirror.
“There’s a shocking picture emerged of a four-year-old boy being treated on a hospital floor because of lack of beds,” Mike said.
“It has to be on the front page – it’s a picture which proves everything we know about the NHS.”
He was right. Mike is a brilliant journalist but more importantly he’s a loving dad and granddad who understands there are two things which matter more than all the rest in this life; our children and our health.
The picture of four-year-old Jack sleeping on a hospital floor despite having suspected pneumonia summed up in one image more than a million words or spreadsheets could ever do.
That picture told how we have a 40,000 shortage of nurses, 4.41 million people stuck on waiting lists for routine operations, and hundreds of crumbling, unsafe hospitals. Our NHS staff are brilliant but they’re overstretched and under-resourced.
We knew we had to be absolutely sure the story was correct before we ran it. One of our most experienced reporters tracked down Jack’s family and a photographer went to their home.
Leeds General Infirmary responded to the allegations and admitted it was all true – little Jack had been left on a floor for four and a half hours and the Chief Executive had apologised personally to Jack’s mum. TRUE STORY.
The picture caused a huge reaction. Boris Johnson refused to look at it when confronted by an ITV reporter, seemingly incapable of empathising with what had happened.
But within hours social media messages appeared discrediting the picture. You may have seen them – and perhaps even doubted us.
It quickly became apparent these messages were a coordinated attack on the picture. But worse, far worse, an attack on Jack and his family. Hundreds started exactly the same way: ‘A good friend of mine is a senior nursing sister at Leeds Hospital..’ before stating the whole picture was a stunt. FAKE NEWS.
When the messages were traced back they seemed to emanate from a random Facebook user who claimed her account had been hacked and didn’t know anyone in Leeds.
The deluge of attacks on Jack’s mum were appalling. Allison Pearson – a Telegraph columnist just like Boris Johnson was until recently – went further saying: “The parents staged it.”
How unutterably cruel and stone-hearted is that?
How utterly vile to publicly denounce one worried mother just because the facts she presented didn’t fit with Allison Pearson’s own view of the Tory government and their treatment of the health service.
But how utterly symptomatic of a country in which now so many people’s response to those with whom they don’t agree is to dismiss them as liars or opportunists.
And how terrifying we’ve become a place where lies are spread so quickly by the likes of Pearson and her old pal Johnson, that millions lose the ability to tell fact from fiction.
There are many things on which we will never agree in this country.
But if we’re to ever crawl out of the sewer of our recent politics we have to agree on just one thing – truth matters.
