Obviously Boris doesn’t deserve coronavirus – but do those who say so deserve to lose their jobs?

Not for the first time since the coronavirus crisis began, controversy has hit Derbyshire. While the other week it was the county’s finest sending up drones to spy on and shame people walking in the Peak District, this week it’s a Labour councillor who has had the whip withdrawn and lost her job at a law firm for saying something nasty about Boris Johnson on the internet.

Sheila Oakes, who is also the mayor of the Derbyshire town of Heanor, made a fool of herself the other day on Facebook. In response to another post, encouraging people to pray for the PM, she said that Johnson, who has just come out of intensive care with coronavirus, ‘completely deserves’ to be laid up because he is ‘one of the worst PMs we’ve ever had’.

When challenged on her comments, Oakes doubled down, saying ‘Johnson has done absolutely nothing for the UK — have you heard how the nurses and doctors have no PPE, that there were not enough ventilators, that the NHS is massively underfunded and yet it is having to deal with this virus’.