Something has to go badly wrong for anyone to become nostalgic for 2020. But the Tory’s latest election announcement – to create the ‘Triple Lock Plus’ – is just the thing to do it.

The first autumn after the pandemic hit, then-chancellor Rishi Sunak was looking at the public finances in dismay, wondering how he might even try to account for the heavy spending that he, his party and Labour had rushed through parliament earlier in the year.