It’s hard not to feel an opportunity was missed by not making Frankie Boyle the new leader of the Labour party instead of the equivocal sub-Blair suit who just got the gig.

… you have to wonder if the virus is so very different from extractive capitalism. It commandeers the manufacturing elements of its hosts, gets them to make stuff for it; kills a fair few, but not enough to stop it spreading. There is no normal for us to go back to. People sleeping in the streets wasn’t normal; children living in poverty wasn’t normal; neither was our taxes helping to bomb the people of Yemen. Using other people’s lives to pile up objects wasn’t normal, the whole thing was absurd. Governments are currently busy pouring money into propping up existing inequalities, and bailing out businesses that have made their shareholders rich. The world’s worst people think that everybody is going to come out of this in a few months and go willingly back into a kind of numbing servitude. Surely it’s time to start imagining something better.

It’s also hard not to feel that, for many of those in the UK whose words I’m reading in recent days, the mere capacity to imagine something better is itself the only something better that they can bring themselves to imagine. Never has there been less pleasure in being proven right regarding your understanding of how the world really works.