I have to admit I'm finding the well-wishing rather sickening. I realise Forms Must Be Followed, but there are thousands of dead already and we haven't seen much (any?) sympathy for them from the great and the good.

Meanwhile someone who has literally dedicated his life to selfishness, dishonesty, and a certain kind of cultivated stupidity gets very public thoughts and prayers from his political peers.

It's not so much that I particularly want Johnson to die forthwith, it's more that it's hard to ignore that he's practically a parable of how well self-indulgent red-in-tooth-and-claw conservatism really fares when physical reality breaks through that protective bubble of hard-edged self-regard.

But I could just be in an unusually cynical mood. I'm starting to hear about people who were alive last week and are dead this week, and it hasn't made me more tolerant of "leaders" who cause more problems than they solve.