“There is not a moment to be lost!” Suddenly, that much-loved cliché from old Boy’s Own-style adventure stories perfectly encapsulates the situation of the Conservative Party. Hitting the ground running will hardly be a sufficient response by the new Tory prime minister: too much time has been lost already. For hard-pressed energy consumers, the only deal so far on offer is Keir Starmer’s pledge to freeze the energy price cap.
No doubt Liz Truss’s advisers (let’s suppose it’s going to be a Truss administration) will churn out sophisticated objections to “throwing money” at a short-term fix. But it may look very different to householders facing astronomic energy bills: they may take the view it is preferable that borrowed money should be thrown at the problem, rather than money drawn from their life savings, and that a short-term fix is better than no fix at all.
