One of my most chilling memories – an image which will remain scarred into my mind for the rest of my life – is of Lyn lying in a hospital bed at Queen Elisabeth hospital in early April 2020. Lyn wasn’t conscious; she was very ill with a tumour. By then I was living in Eltham, and I had gone to visit her. Of course I had been in two minds about going to see her: at that time the pandemic was just starting, and I didn’t want to make things worse. Yet I really wanted to visit my friend, a person who I owed so much to, and had shared so many memories with. I just remember the sight of her lying motionless in bed, feeling so furious that there was nothing I could do to help.

It now appears that at that time, at the time when we were all sheltering, desperate to avoid becoming infected or to infect anyone else, the very people who were supposed to be running the country, advising us to stay safe and social distance, were throwing parties. They were dancing in the offices of state, as if it didn’t matter what the rest of us were having to go through. This morning video has emerged of one of those parties, showing people dancing and cavorting together like students at a campus disco.

How is it possible that any human being so be so arrogant? How can they feel so superior and separate from the rest of us that they felt they had a right to party while so many others died? The mental juxtaposition of the memory of Lyn in that hospital bed, butting up to the footage I saw when I turned on my computer this morning, is sickening. Lyn died a few days later, and to be honest for some time part of me was worried that my visit had caused her death. Of course, many other people will have memories like mine, of friends they will never be able to speak to again, dying during the most catastrophic medical emergency in living history. Surely they too will look at this film and, remembering their friends or loved ones, feel the rage I now do.

Together with the political turmoil of this week, surely the Tories, as a group of people who feels so entitled that they give themselves the right to party while so many others die, can never be forgiven for this.