Opinion: Brian Beacom: Why Miriam Margolyes was right to wish Boris Johnson dead

She said: “Appallingly, of course. It’s a disgrace, it’s a public scandal. I had difficulty not wanting Boris Johnson to die [when he contracted the illness]. I wanted him to die.”

Her comment not only attracted 240 complaints to Ofcom, it infused righteous indignation in the likes of Piers Morgan and sent Twitter rockets off, many of which labelled her "vile".

Margolyes once said the F word on TV’s University Challenge while representing Cambridge but the D word brought about even louder recrimination.

Suddenly, the Harry Potter star had turned herself from being a favourite mad auntie into what one Twitter twit called "a Myra Hindley figure".

Yet, isn’t her comment perfectly understandable? Margolyes’ voice is that of anger and frustration.

She’s been angered from Day One by a Tory cabinet so embroiled in battles with the civil service that when Covid did strike the cabinet of infrastructure and cohesion had been emptied.

Like many of us she is raging that the Britain is top of the world league of death tolls, alongside the dumpster fire that is America, both states run by men who chose to deny the power of the pandemic (despite warnings from WHO, and the lessons of China and Italy.)

She is clearly incensed about our inability to procure PPE, our inhumanity in placing Covid sufferers into care homes. She will be seriously disturbed to hear of (just last week) the Birmingham hospital anaesthetist who was forced to head to a pound shop to buy the plastic to make her own PPE – while rugby league in the north of England is backed to the tune of £15m.

We can only assume Potter’s Professor Pomona Sprout has most likely been infuriated by the hypocrisy of government advisers such as Professor Neil Ferguson and Dr Catherine Calderwood.

And right now, Margolyes has 40,000 reasons to come out with her killer line. (Viewers in Scotland can be allowed a heightened anger, given the devolved government’s Sleeping Beauty approach to Covid, waiting until kissed by reality before tough measures are taken; and now our virus reproduction ‘R’ number – is worse than the rest of the UK.)

Margolyes is also aware the UK Government is now washing its sanitised hands of responsibility by telling us to "stay alert". What does this mean? Take up a Dad’s Army position? Scan the horizons searching for Covid? What are we, meerkats?

She will certainly be apoplectic at the trend towards triumphalism, the claims both north and south of the border that we are doing ever so well to keep the deaths to the figure they are.

So, of course, Margolyes, should be allowed to say she hoped Boris would shuffle off. She didn’t actually wish to see our modern day Colonel Blimp on a slab. She didn’t call for a fatwah.

Oscar Wilde wrote; “Nothing is so aggravating as calmness. There is something positively brutal about the good temper of most modern men.” Let loose with a bit of temper.

Psychologist Joni E Johnston argues: “It’s normal to wish someone who has hurt you would die or disappear. Although not necessarily productive, I don't think it always worrisome to fantasise about ways to help that person along in his journey out of our lives.”

Yes, Margolyes is a 78-year-old institution who happens to love the sound of her own voice. 'I would have to admit that I'm daring in my comments,” she said in an interview six years ago. "I do say things possibly other people don't say.”

But let’s bear in mind that having said the Johnson lines, she withdrew them. “I don’t want to be the sort of person that wants people to die. So then I wanted him to get better, which he did do, he did get better. But he didn’t get better as a human being.”

In the case of Margolyes v Twitter we should measure the emotion, not the optics. And remember, the actor has every right to be angry. It’s a shame more or us didn’t become more Miriam eight weeks ago.

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