Even a Daily Mail journalist appearing on a TV programme suggested the reason could be the phone contains black humour, remarks about the pandemic made in the "pressure cooker moment", as the journalist put it, that would come across as insensitive in the cold light of day. But no one knows if that is the reason for withholding the phone. What's interesting are people's reactions to the possibility that it is.
Evidently the journalist himself accepts such a response would not be untypical of Mr Johnson: Mr Johnson is not noted for his gravity. And with that in mind, I followed up with a question about it.
In a Tweet that is getting well over 8,000 views so far, I asked: 'Why would you make black jokes about deaths in a pandemic? - that is the question. Why? Why would your response to a national disaster be to trivialise it with "pressure cooker" black humour?'
The overwhelming number of 'Likes' for my Tweet suggests people find that joking about the pandemic would at least be out of place. More arresting were the few that found it was 'only human', that 'we all joke about death', or that I was being judgmental about what was in fact 'coping', in the same way that medics and nurses often cope with the awful business of death. In the last case I pointed out, I think fairly, that Boris Johnson is not a medic or a nurse but was the country's prime minister.
No doubt people differ as individuals, use a variety of personal defence mechanisms to get by, and adopt opposing loyalties, especially in respect of the famous and those elected to govern us.
But what was very striking was no one said straight out we should be able to expect better of our politicians, particularly a prime minister and leader, and that more appropriate and reassuring messages to find on the missing phone would be spontaneous sympathy for the people who died and those who suffered their loss.
Who knows? Perhaps it's there.
