Though he hasn’t yet made a full recovery, Boris Johnson was released from St. Thomas’ Hospital in London where he was being treated for severe symptoms of COVID-19, giving Britons one more thing to celebrate on Easter Sunday, even as millions adjusted to spending the holiday alone and on lockdown.
Last week, Johnson was briefly moved to the ICU and reportedly received some oxygen support, though he was never put on a ventilator (a process that would’ve required placing the PM in a medically induced coma).
The PM released a statement last night thanking the NHS for their service and for his treatment, saying he “owes his life” to the NHS.
According to the BBC, it’s unclear when Johnson will return to work. In the mean time, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab will continue to run the country while the PM rests at Chequers, the PM’s country estate.
Now, get ready for a wave of “Boris is dead” conspiracy theories, as one twitter wit pointed out.
Waiting for the conspiracy theorists to say he’s been replaced by a Chinese robot 🤖#Lockdown #BoJo pic.twitter.com/TKTpAiKvMV
— Prof. Guy Ashton (@prof_guy) April 12, 2020
As the Washington Post explained a few days ago, Johnson’s hospitalization has made him more popular than ever, and helped sooth public anger directed at his initial handling of the outbreak, which recent reporting has shown was largely directed by government scientists.
Unseen in his hospital bed, Johnson dominates the news. He’s the absent leader at Britain’s darkest hour. He is the master orator, silenced.
And yet at this moment, the prime minister is somehow at his most human. He’s a middle-aged everyman bloke struggling to get out of the virus ward alive. And the people are pulling for him.
In a touching column, the Telegraph – the newspaper where Johnson once worked as just another hack writer – insisted that Johnson’s health is “the health of the nation” and that all of Britain has been wondering: “How is Boris?”
As Twitter blue-checks sneered about Johnson’s misfortune, the Telegraph explained that Johnson has for years been loved by Britons in a way that the “metropolitan media class” has never really understood.
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!”
The column continued: “All 66 million of us are metaphorically pacing the hospital corridor, desperate for news.”
Yet,