This was achieved by:
* moving many pass statements in tests onto their own lines, so they pass line coverage and can match an easy ignore pattern if branch coverage is added later.
* removing code that cannot be reached.
* removing long-disabled tests.
* removing unused code.
* adding tests for uncovered code

It turned out that removing `if __name__ == '__main__'` blocks that run unittest.main() at the bottom of test files was surprisingly contentious, so they remain and can be filtered out with an appropriate .coveragerc.