Governments do not get to choose the weather, but that does not mean they are at the mercy of the elements. The hardship that would be caused by a cold winter is foreseeable. Shortages of energy are not predestined, but it is reasonable to warn the public of the disruptions to supply, as National Grid has done. The company has raised the prospect of three-hour blackouts. It is not the likeliest scenario, but a feasible one if demand for gas outstrips supplies from the rest of Europe.
Liz Truss does not want to be the prime minister who imposed energy rationing, and appears to favour denial as the method to avoid it happening. She does not flatly rule out any prospect of shortages, but she belittles the risk by refusing to engage with it candidly.
Meanwhile, an information campaign by the business department encouraging simple energy-saving behaviours has reportedly been blocked by Downing Street, ostensibly because of the £15m cost.
That is a small sum compared with the tens of billions that the government is committed to spend on holding bills down over the winter. That expenditure, which will increase the fiscal deficit, will be lower if there is a collective national effort to use energy frugally. A successful campaign to manage expectations and encourage conservation would comfortably pay for itself. The business secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg, is hardly inclined to make a nanny of the state, but the prime minister turns out to have an even more visceral objection to anything that smacks of government bossiness.
Ms Truss is not a complete stranger to pragmatism. She recognises that massive state intervention is necessary to protect people from soaring energy prices. She has initiated a necessary thaw in relations with France and the rest of Europe. She did, eventually, yield to reason on cutting the 45p tax rate.
But the pattern has been to arrive at a rational position by way of its opposite. Before she was in favour of subsidies for energy use, she was firmly against such “handouts” to households and businesses. Relations with President Macron only needed thawing because she froze them with crass francophobic comments during the Tory leadership contest.
She abandoned a tax cut because even her own MPs thought it gratuitously rewarded the rich. Even the financial markets rejected the government’s fiscal plans in exactly the way that Ms Truss had been sure they wouldn’t.
In other words, the prime minister’s judgment is poor – on economics, politics and diplomacy. She is enamoured of radicalism and controversy for their own sake, and appears to measure the heroic boldness of a policy by the strength of reaction against it. Her mental map of the political terrain is divided into the tiny ideological clique that endorses her plans and the “anti-growth coalition” comprising everyone else. It is populism without the popularity; a recipe for erratic, divisive government and social discontent.
Many Conservative MPs suspected that was the case before Ms Truss entered Downing Street. They are now sure of it and wondering how to limit the damage to their election prospects and – a matter of much greater urgency – to the country.
In a very short time, the prime minister has established a record of saying things with confidence that turn out to be wrong. A difficult winter, with millions facing fuel and food poverty, would deplete the standing of any government. Ms Truss’s administration embarks on that challenge already in a crisis of authority. She might get lucky with a warm winter, but it is a weak and inadequate leader who gambles so much on something as unpredictable as the weather.
