The vocal minority celebrating Boris Johnson’s coronavirus diagnosis

What does it tell us that so many left-leaning individuals took to social media this week in order to celebrate the news that Boris Johnson has tested positive for coronavirus? Others stooped even lower and openly yearned for his death, complete with triumphal emojis and GIFs. It would simply never occur to most of us to revel in the illness of a fellow human creature simply on the grounds that he or she represents a political worldview that we find repellent. So why does this instinct come so naturally to those who, barely a few weeks earlier, were hectoring their followers about the importance of compassion and peppering their tweets with the #BeKind hashtag?

I’m not the only one to have noticed the increased level of vitriol on social media since the lockdown begun. If I were to speculate, I would suggest that it is symptomatic of some kind of existential crisis.