https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/10/opinions/uks-concern-for-boris-johnson-overrides-politics/index.html
Something extraordinary is happening in the middle of this extraordinary crisis. While the physical health of the world is in peril, a new kind of health is emerging in which the emotional connections between people start to strengthen along new, fresh lines. I call this social hfealth.
This can be seen most clearly in the world of politics where old borders and enmities are dissolving. For evidence of this, look no further than my home country, Britain, and the response to the hospitalization due to complications from coronavirus of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
I have known Boris for 30 years, from when he was editor of The Spectator, the famous conservative magazine. I was briefly in charge of high-value donor fundraising for the Labour Party and am the daughter of a man so left wing that Bernie Sanders flew over to the UK to give the “Eric Hobsbawm” lecture at the famous Hay Festival.
Boris doesn’t do boundaries. If he likes you, he likes you. If you are not of his political persuasion, no matter. This underscores both his popularity with the public — he won a landslide in the general election in December — and the response to his medical predicament.
When “Boris” (we refer to our leader by his first name, unlike Americans, who seem to refer to theirs by his surname) was taken into St. Thomas’ Hospital opposite the Houses of Parliament last Sunday evening and then moved on Monday night into intensive care, you could almost hear the collective gasp of grief and concern.
In the Daily Telegraph, house Bible of Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party and where he was a popular columnist for many years, you would expect the kind of sentiment expressed by Allison Pearson who wrote: “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.”