Last October, the then-chair of the Conservative party, Jake Berry, declared the solution to rising energy prices was simple: “People know that when their bills arrive, they can either cut their consumption or they can … go out there and get that new job.” This week, Mr Berry disclosed his worries about rising mortgage bills, or what he termed “the mortgage bomb about to go off”, and called on the government to spend many millions in public money to bail out distressed households.
Two soaring bills and one Tory MP with two diametrically opposed answers: what could possibly account for the difference?
In fairness to Mr Berry, he is hardly the only Conservative alarmed at rocketing mortgage rates, and one doesn’t need Sherlock Holmes to divine why. The politicians most inclined to cite budgetary calculations as the reason for denying hungry children free meals in school holidays are doing hard electoral maths on what it means when 2.4 million households roll off their fixed-rate mortgages just in time for a general election.
