This is the one glaring omission from this election’s endless debates

Back in June 2021 as the UK began to emerge from the long months of lockdown, I interviewed one of the world’s leading epidemiologists, Jay Bhattacharya, for The Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast.

The Stanford-based professor of medicine told me that lockdowns “will be seen as the single biggest public health mistake in history”.

At a time when all the UK’s main political parties backed lockdown vehemently, with Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer and Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP incessantly calling for Covid-related restrictions to be even more punitive, Bhattacharya’s words were not universally welcomed.

On the contrary, his efforts to promote “targeted shielding” – helping the elderly and others with medical conditions that make them particularly vulnerable to Covid, while letting the rest of us get on with our lives – were widely dismissed as irresponsible.

Even in that climate, when to question lockdown was to face social ostracism, Bhattacharya was warning of the “enormous collateral consequences” of keeping people inside and isolating them from their loved ones during the Covid-19 pandemic. He was supported by two more top epidemiologists – Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Martin Kulldorff, then of Harvard.

“Every single poor person on the face of the earth has faced some harm, sometimes catastrophic harm, from this lockdown policy,” Bhattacharya told me. “Almost from the very beginning, lockdown was going to have enormous collateral consequences, things that are sometimes hard to see but are nevertheless real.”

I’m shocked – but hardly surprised – that the UK’s lockdown policies have been barely discussed during this election campaign.

There seems to be a conspiracy of silence between the main parties to keep quiet about lockdown, seeing as all of them agreed with and helped reinforce it. This position is now, at the very least, open to serious question.

Missed operations, economic scarring, compromised schooling and very serious damage to people’s mental health – not least among children and young adults – were just some of the problems stored up for the future by shutting down the country three times in 2020 and 2021.

It’s clear – as shown by the WhatsApp conversations revealed in The Telegraph’s Lockdown Files – that the ministers and officials imposing lockdown with such fervour were well aware of the possibility, and then the reality, of the collateral damage caused to millions. They pushed ahead with the controversial policy despite warnings the cure would be worse than the disease.

Amidst the election campaign and well away from the public eye the UK’s ridiculous “Covid Inquiry” rumbles on. The inquiry team is touring the country as part of the “Every Story Matters” project, allowing people to speak anonymously without giving formal evidence to the inquiry.

Our Covid inquiry is astonishingly drawn out – having started in June 2022 and scheduled to take evidence until at least June 2026. It’s a lawyers’ bonanza, paid for by us – with costs exceeding £70m last year alone and the final bill expected to reach almost £200m.

Rather than addressing the central question – whether, if the UK faces a pandemic similar to Covid-19, we lock down again or not – this Covid investigation has instead become a ludicrously expensive talking shop.

Meanwhile a majority of British scientists now believe ministers failed to pay sufficient attention to the long-term collateral damage of lockdowns.

It’s clear the decision to make the NHS a Covid-only service has contributed mightily to soaring waiting lists – which rose from 4.6m in February 2020, the month before lockdown began, to a record 7.5m now, according to NHS England. Survey evidence from the Office for National Statistics suggests the real figure could be almost 10m.

A study from University College London in February estimated that 12,000 years of life had been lost in Britain because of delays in diagnosing skin cancer during Covid lockdowns.

Ofsted has warned that loneliness, boredom and misery became “endemic” among children, whose physical and mental health declined during lockdown, with an estimated 100,000 “ghost” children still missing the majority of their schooling as a direct result of the dislocation and disruption caused by the UK’s decision repeatedly to lock down schools.

Only Nigel Farage has had the guts to weigh in, describing lockdown last week as “Britain’s biggest-ever peacetime mistake” – a phrase echoing that of Bhattacharya.

Even when it comes to the extensive economic impact of lockdown the broader silence is deafening.

The UK’s cost of living crisis was certainly made worse by the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 – which led to soaring energy prices and inflation of 11.1pc, the highest in 40 years.

But the month before Putin invaded, UK inflation was already well above 5pc, more than twice the Bank of England’s target and a 30-year high – the direct result of lockdown-related supply-chain disruptions.

The government spent some £400bn during lockdown on furlough and business support loans. Our national debt meanwhile surged from around 80pc to almost 100pc of GDP, as tax revenues collapsed.

Much of that debt was bought using quantitative easing, with the Bank of England creating more “funny money” from nothing during 18 months of lockdown than it did during the decade that followed the 2008/09 financial crisis.

What was the impact of that unprecedented monetary expansion, sanctioned by ministers, on inflation and living standards – and should we repeat the exercise? Again, amid all the razzmatazz of the election and endless “leaders’ debates”, there has been no examination or discussion of such lockdown-related issues at all.

The impact of lockdown and the question of how the UK should respond to the next pandemic remain at the heart of the nation’s collective psyche.

The fact this highly controversial policy has barely been mentioned during the subsequent general election campaign, despite compelling evidence countless mistakes were made, is yet another reason public faith in politics is so seriously diminished.