The US is baffled by the way we Brits treat our prime ministers
When Donald Trump, on learning of Boris Johnson’s deteriorating health, made a characteristically flamboyant offer of experimental treatment, one thing would have troubled his team: exactly who should they contact?
The president declared that he had already arranged for representatives of leading drug companies to meet the Prime Minister’s doctors, raising the prospect of a hard-pressed NHS medic being hoicked out of the intensive care unit at St Thomas’ to speak to a big pharma crony of the president.
It would not have occurred to Mr Trump that a world leader of an advanced economy such as the United Kingdom would not have a personal physician, indeed a team of devoted doctors and nurses, to care for his every medical need.
As Mr Johnson fights for his health on a public ward in an NHS hospital, given the same treatment, apparently, as every other British patient seriously ill with coronavirus, perhaps it is time for the UK to question why this is the case.
The lack of care and attention paid to the health of prime ministers appears baffling here in the US. In Washington, the White House Medical Unit, with its staff of 24 currently headed by the White House physician, Sean Conley, makes constant risk assessments about the physical and medical status of the president. An advance team of doctors ensures he is never more than 20 minutes by car or helicopter from a trauma unit.
Air Force One is effectively a flying hospital, complete with intensive care equipment. The president travels with two medical teams so one arrives refreshed and ready for action while the other sleeps. Back at the White House, a doctor is on duty day and night and the facilities are described as akin to a small hospital.
Should the president fall ill, there would be no question of him being left to sweat it out alone, as Mr Johnson was when he entered self-isolation in the flat at 11 Downing Street two weeks ago. The Prime Minister is said to have agreed to go to hospital after a consultation with his GP via the video conferencing platform Zoom, a scenario unimaginable in Washington DC, where a poorly commander-in-chief would have been whisked to the in-house medical unit and given round-the-clock care.
Americans are used to presidents making public their private health information. So we know that while Trump is over 70 and overweight, with a penchant for junk food, he has no other health concerns of the kind that would make him more susceptible to, say, a novel coronavirus. Can we say the same about Mr Johnson? Any potential underlying conditions should have been a factor when determining whether he was safe to continue his usual work at the outset of the pandemic.
Except that, again in contrast to the US, there is no one at No 10 considering the Prime Minister’s health in any given circumstance in the same way there is here in America.
The focus on a president’s physical wellbeing is perhaps understandable in a nation that has suffered the trauma of losing four leaders to assassins’ bullets. Perhaps the trauma of watching the PM fighting for breath in a public ward in St Thomas’ Hospital will finally focus similar attention on the health of the British commander-in-chief.