MEDIA WATCH: Follow the money- Trump vs Johnson

THE IDEA of spending an extra £350 million a week on the UK’s National Health Service  (NHS) is the Brexit equivalent of Donald Trump’s Mexican border wall: a policy that exists somewhere in between reality and metaphor reports The Week

After more than a year of senior Brexiters insisting that Johnson’s campaign bus slogan – “We send the EU £350 MILLIONa week. Let’s fund the NHS instead” – represented a possibility, not a pledge,  Britain’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has repeated the claim that “we will take back control of roughly £350m per week” and that “a lot” of it should go to the NHS.

In doing so, he has attracted the ire of Sir David Norgrove, the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, who said he was “surprised and disappointed” by the Foreign Secretary’s “clear misuse of statistics”. Johnson, meanwhile, accused Norgrove of a “wilful distortion of the text of my article”.

It remains to be seen whether Johnson’s intervention will help or harm his leadership ambitions. If he succeeds. the price for the keys to No 10 may now be £350m a week in extra funding for the NHS comments The Week

Johnson has been accused of the “clear misuse” of official figures after he revived the controversial claim that Brexit would save the UK £350m a week, which could be spent on the NHS.

The rebuke came from Sir David Norgrove, chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, who said he was “surprised and disappointed” the Foreign Secretary had repeated the widely discredited figure in a recent article for The Daily Telegraph.

In a letter published Sunday, the statistician said the figure “confuses” the gross and net contributions the UK makes to EU coffers and fails to take into account other payments the UK receives from the EU.