Coronavirus is creating a hole at the heart of government | Gaby Hinsliff

Beyond this private and very understandable distress lies a grave new political reality

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Once in a generation - and only then if it's unlucky - a nation finds itself living through events so dramatic they almost defy belief.

Not Boris Johnson, surely. Not that most bouncy and irrepressible of men, who always seemed the definition of a lucky general. While we know this virus does not discriminate, there is still something faintly surreal about the idea of the prime minister lying in intensive care, his own body now a battlefield for the virus that has come to define his fledgling premiership.