“You scaremongering ignorant fucking cunt, you and your retarded team made predictions that could have fucked this country for billions of pounds, fucked Christmas for a second time and cost thousands thier [sic] jobs only to have your most pessimistic ballshit [sic] now found to be just that. How fucks like you can sleep at night is beyond me and I hope you are fucking held to account for what you have done and could have done if there weren’t some people in the government with a brain.”

How would you like to get this in your inbox? As a senior scientist advising the government on Covid, I get this sort of email on a fairly regular basis. Indeed, (someone calling himself) Mr Roberts (who sent this) is a regular offender. What particularly upset me about this email was that it wasn’t sent to me, but to a junior member of my team. Awful, isn’t it?