The human behind the politician mask

A touching moment in Rachel Sylvester & Alice Thomson’s interview with Alan Johnson for The Times:

When people ask him how many children he has, he always says four — sometimes even making up a job for Natalie. “It’s quite nice to pretend she’s still alive,” he says. “It just feels wrong for a child to die before a parent.” He bumped into David Cameron after the death of his son Ivan. “I put my hand on his shoulder and said, ‘I’ve been through it’.”

It’s nice to be reminded of the human side of our politicians once in a while. We’re so very good at forgetting it, and they make it so easy for us to do so.