Amanda Platell

ASIX-YEAR-OLD boy holidaying in London with his family was hurled 100ft from the viewing platform of the Tate Modern gallery. His mother let out a ‘primal scream’ as he plummeted to what she thought would be his certain death, in August last year.

Six months later we learnt the parents of this little French child, whose limbs are now held together by metal, are celebrating that he can ‘eat mash’.

Soon he ‘will be able to drink, with a straw to start with’, they say.

As revealed in the Mail yesterday, the man who threw the child to what he hoped would be his death, Jonty Bravery, had warned, even bragged of, his plans.

He was a teenager in care with severe autism and aggressive behavioural problems who told two of his six carers — who watched over him day and night at a cost of £150,000 a year — he wanted to kill someone.

In autumn 2018 one of the carers recorded Bravery saying he was determined to ‘push somebody off’ a tall building so he would be sent to prison, an idea he found preferable to living in council care in a flat in West London, subsidised by us.

Somehow, despite his appalling statement of intent, Bravery was allowed out to commit his terrible crime. It is the most sorry tale of care in the community gone wrong. Bravery had what most of us with ailing elderly parents are begging for — 24-hour care, at home.

And yet, from Radio 4’s Today programme to ITV’s GMB, people lined up yesterday to place the blame on ‘cuts’. That little boy would still be playing footie if it hadn’t been for ‘austerity’, the pundits crowed.

What nonsense. Bravery’s own family couldn’t cope with him, so the state stepped in. He had more money spent on him a week than elderly people languishing at home in squalor could dream of. It is a heartbreaking story of human failure and tragedy. To hijack it and try to turn it into a political football is nothing short of atrocious.

And by drawing attention away from the real failings in Bravery’s care, it makes it harder for us all to learn the lessons of this awful case.

The consequences of his demented cruelty are faced by a family trying to heal their son’s broken body. ‘Our little knight begins to speak!’ they messaged last week. Through their terrible pain, hope still shines.