This feels like a moment, a hinge point in Britain’s faltering progress since the financial crisis in 2008 and more recently Brexit. The Queen, at 96, has died. The passing of this

irreplaceable figure who, for many, embodied the idea of Britain, adds to the gravitas of the moment. We are in uncharted waters and in urgent need of grown-up leadership. The Tory

leadership vaudeville is over. Time to snap back to reality. Boris Johnson, the supreme illusionist, has left the stage, grumbling. Liz Truss, his successor in Number 10, has the unenviable

task of steadying the ship in the face of storm-force headwinds. The scale of the task facing Truss and her hand-picked team is immense: soaring inflation, economic recession, labour unrest,

football manager. Politics, like football, is a cut-throat business. Truss, like the modern football manager, doesn’t have long to deliver – and to survive. Her team doesn’t tolerate

losers. Her decision to throw the kitchen sink at the energy crisis shows that she understands the urgency of the situation. Millions face fuel poverty this winter. Thousands of businesses

that can’t pay their fuel bills face bankruptcy. People are scared. The elderly in particular are dreading a winter when many will have to choose between eating enough and keeping warm. My

90-year-old stepmother told me a few days ago: “Winter’s coming and I’m frankly afraid. ” Truss’s call is the right one. It is also, politically, the only one. Faced with a battery of

problems she has made the simple judgment that putting people’s mind at rest before the storm will provide her with the room to tackle the other big issues she faces. Her free market crusade

will have to wait. Energy security is now her top priority. Her party managers will have pointed out that an epidemic of poverty would pose a mortal danger to the Tory party’s dwindling

electoral prospects. There will still be plenty of people, ground down by years of austerity, who will not be able to afford the £2,500 cost of capped energy prices. But the move – swift and

clear – does take the fear out of the next few months for many. The plan is not costed yet. But that’s hardly surprising. Much less commendable, if unsurprising, is Truss’s stubborn

insistence on paying for the mooted £150 billion mainly through borrowing. It saddles future generations with yet more debt in effect to protect oil and gas company profits. It drives up the

cost of servicing the national debt at a time of rapidly rising interest rates . It also limits the scope of funding other cash-strapped public services such as the NHS or social care or

supplying Ukraine with more weapons to push back Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Truss, who virtue-signals her devotion to free-market economics at every opportunity, argues that to ask energy

companies to contribute to this war chest, would discourage them from investing in new energy projects. The signs are that energy policy, now in the tender hands of the arch-climate sceptic

Jacob Rees Mogg, will lift the ban on fracking and encourage more not less carbon production by ramping up offshore oil and gas production in the North Sea. There are two flaws in this

argument. The first is, quite simply, that it won’t. A further windfall tax will not stop the oil majors from doing what they do which is to build their businesses. Oil exploration is tough

but it’s also a license to print money. The BP boss Bernard Looney described his company as a “cash machine” as energy prices soar. The second argument is that asking everyone except the oil

companies to help out in this unprecedented crisis is frankly perverse — though not perhaps to an out and out free-marketeer. Commercial enterprises do not exist, let alone thrive, in a

vacuum, any more than do consumers. They benefit from state support, the infrastructure that helps them get their products to market, the education that delivers their recruits, the health

system that looks after them, the armed forces that defend their strategic interests in places like the Gulf and Brunei. Companies are also in a sense citizens. Their responsibilities extend

beyond shareholders and executives. Truss does not see it that way. She has made much of the fact that she is a (born-again) Tory and will govern as a Tory. She has gathered a team of

fervent free marketeers around her. She promises a bonfire of regulation that will unchain Britannia. She believes, against all the evidence of the past 40 years, that tax cuts are the magic

key to growth. The new Prime Minister has come roaring into power and planted the banner of unfettered free enterprise in Whitehall. Her intentions are serious. She wants to “make a

difference”. Her Chancellor, Kwazi Kwarteng, has sacked Tom Scholar, the Treasury’s Permanent Secretary. Our great offices of state are increasingly being run like corporations. And yet her

first act has been to launch one of the biggest state-funded social and economic rescue packages in peacetime history.  The problem with ideology (left or right) is that it is almost

invariably the enemy of good sense.  It is also, in a democracy, vulnerable to events. Johnson’s plans, such as they were, were derailed by Covid. We shall see if Truss can ride out the cost

of living crisis, or whether we are witnessing this Tory party’s end of days. A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an

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