The last few days have been some of the most extraordinary of my reporting career

The prime minister being taken into intensive care is something I think we still haven’t grasped the gravity of, writes Rob Merrick

Boris Johnson had been working from home before being taken to hospital (PA)

The last British prime minister to die in office was Viscount Palmerston, that champion of Empire-building “gunboat diplomacy”, way, way back in 1865.

This is obviously a macabre fact to bring up, given our current leader has had to be placed in a hospital intensive care ward, but it is one I have found myself pondering in recent days. Thankfully, Boris Johnson now appears to be on the road to recovery.

Incidentally, a bit like Johnson – accused of ignoring his own “social distancing” guidelines – the 80-year-old Palmerston apparently failed to follow advice to rest in bed when he caught a nasty chill.

Since the shock news from St Thomas’ Hospital, there has been huge coverage of Mr Johnson’s condition. Nevertheless, I wonder whether the full enormity of the situation involving the prime minister has really struck home, because of the unprecedented crisis all around us.

In normal times, there would be TV crews from around the world camped out across the river from parliament, reporting breathlessly on every whisper from within the hospital walls.

With the distress of the daily death toll rising sharply at home, and the world caught up in its own turmoil, even a prime minister so gravely ill struggles, naturally, for the normal attention.

And, of course, we cannot report from the spot, or properly quiz those left striving to steady the ship, as we huddle over laptops far from our normal desks in the Westminster press gallery.

Even before coronavirus struck, we had reported on so many jawdropping political events in recent years – the 2008 financial crash, the first coalition government in generations, the Brexit vote and fallout.

Despite all that, a prime minister falling victim to the very disease he is meant to be leading the nation’s fight against is an extraordinary moment I will remember long after my reporting days are done.

Even the most recent precedents – Churchill’s heart attack and pneumonia during the Second World War, Lloyd-George catching Spanish flu – were many decades ago and kept secret at the time.

Given Johnson is the hard Brexit torchbearer, and has been guilty of appalling racist rabble-rousing in the past, I suspect many Independent readers do not think fondly of him usually.

But we should all be cheered that he is making “steady progress”, a bright spot in these dark times.

Yours,

Rob Merrick

Deputy political editor