How is Boris? For millions of people, that was our first thought upon waking yesterday. And our last thought before we fell asleep the night before. The prospect of losing our Prime Minister was profoundly shocking. “He won’t die, will he?” a friend texted at 11.18pm. “My heart will break.”

It’s rare for a politician to inspire such emotion, but Boris is loved – really loved – in a way that the metropolitan media class has never begun to understand. Hearing reporters and doctors on TV talking about the PM’s admission to the ICU at St Thomas’s Hospital, discussing the likely effect on his lungs and “other vital organs”, was horrible; the picture of naked vulnerability it painted so entirely at odds with our rambunctious hero barrelling into a room with a quizzical rub of that blond mop and a booming: “Hi, folks!”

Yet, make no mistake, the health of Boris Johnson is the health of the body politic and, by extension, the health of the nation itself. All 66 million of us are metaphorically pacing the hospital corridor, desperate for news.

Everything feels heavy with symbolism right now. How could it not? We find ourselves in the middle of a newly written Shakespearean tragedy, the ink barely dry before the next page turns. The PM has succumbed to a vicious virus which has laid siege to the country, suspending the life and liberty that no one values more than he does. Like a sleeper agent, Covid-19 infiltrated his system and, now that it’s activated, his MI5 is at risk of losing control. The only cure for it is rest – but Boris could not rest.