When he looks back at his catastrophic campaign, Rishi Sunak should be able to console himself with at least one thing: people didn’t publicly address him by his Covid nickname, Dr Death. To date, the election campaign, in terms of pandemic reminders, could hardly have gone better for him.

The Labour campaign has seemed as disinclined as most of Sunak’s interviewers to dwell on a pandemic record that, on its own, amounts to a case for Conservative annihilation. The last government’s occasional successes do not compensate for the delays, chaos, callousness, rule breaking and still emerging scandal of preferential PPE contracts: just last week a man was arrested in a PPE investigation linked to Baroness Mone. Britain’s was the second highest excess death rate in western Europe.

The Covid inquiry continues. If the election hadn’t been called the same week as Simon Case’s postponed appearance, more attention might have focused on his line about the “worst governing ever seen”. Case confirmed, also, that he hadn’t learned in advance about Sunak’s project, “eat out to help out”, even though he was in charge of Covid policy. The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK group claims, plausibly, that it “contributed to the loss of thousands of lives”.

But the pandemic might, for as much as it has surfaced in election coverage, be the subject of some national exercise in selective forgetting, with the worst suffering put tactfully aside. Did we, as a man asks at the end of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (“ ’tis all wonderful, ’tis all a dream”),........

© The Guardian