The political calculation at the heart of the energy price guarantee wasn’t its cost. Rather, it was that the government sensed it wasn’t going to get much credit for it. This came to pass, as focus groups would find people sarcastically saying ‘thanks, so my energy bill is *only* double what it was last year’.
The real unforced error was on mortgages. As I’ve written previously – partly to say something nice about the government but also because it’s true – interest rates were already rising around the world prior to the disastrous ‘mini-budget’ (a term that may perplex economic historians of the 22nd century).
