The column you don’t want to read

Curiously unobserved about last month’s US election: how astonishing it was that the candidates’ policy positions during the pandemic played a role in neither the campaigns nor the results. It may feel as if Covid was a long time ago, but do the math. It wasn’t.

In the US and UK, medical hysteria gravely blighted a good two-and-a-half years of our lives, only roundly concluding a couple of years ago – if then, for several passengers on my flight to London last week were still wearing those insipid paper masks, the sight of which inspired both my pitying contempt and shudder-inducing flashbacks.

Yet the biggest public health debacle in world history has been subject to a wilful public amnesia, as if it never happened. Surely you’ve noticed yourselves that the subject never arises in conversation, when so recently the C-word was all we could talk about. By ‘debacle’ I meant, of course, not the spread of the virus itself, but the spread of unprecedented, anti-democratic political overreach; of irrational, superstitious micromanagement of the disgusting, infectious proles; and of the high-handed, wholesale cancellation of civil rights.