How Will New PM's £100bn Plan Solve The Energy Crisis?

Liz Truss is the UK's new prime minister, and Vladimir Putin has all but cut off the gas supply to Europe.

- Harry Cockburn

In the UK, where 85 per cent of homes are heated by gas central heating, and 40-50 per cent of the country's electricity is gas-generated, soaring European demand for the fossil fuel and the resulting sky-high energy bills mean Ms Truss's first job as PM is to intervene in the increasingly dysfunctional energy market as millions face winter hardship.

And it's not only households that will suffer, with many pubs, restaurants and other businesses warning they face closure with bills on course to rise sevenfold in some cases.

Where markets are disrupted and fail with such speed and with such profound impacts, Conservatives' ideological trust in laissez-faire capitalism is especially exposed to the harsh demands of reality.

Like rabbits hypnotised by the headlights of a deadly juggernaut, practically no strategy to deal with the tsunami of bills was announced by Boris Johnson's "zombie government", and similarly, during the Tory leadership race to succeed him, neither Ms Truss nor Rishi Sunak touted a major package to stave off the economic chaos.

Both their campaigns offered plans that would take just a few hundred pounds off the several thousand pounds that Britons are now faced with.

But on the day Ms Truss becomes PM, and hours after she promised to "deliver, deliver, deliver", a new plan emerged.

Ms Truss is now expected to freeze household energy bills for 18 months at around £2,500 a year for average households, with the suggestion it could cost the treasury somewhere between £90bn-£130bn.