Mark Steyn: Are Boris' pipe dreams leaving Britons in the cold as energy prices soar?

You know who’s not dreaming of a White Christmas with every Christmas card he writes? Boris Johnson.

Right now, he’s dreaming of a sun-drenched Christmas in which you can fry an egg on pavements from Bognor to Belfast. Because it may well be that what finally does for the flailing prime minister is not wine and cheese but wind and gas. Unlike wine and cheese at Number Ten, wind and gas are in short supply.

The media are reporting that the energy price cap will be doubled to two thousand pounds per year in April.

Since August, over a third of domestic gas suppliers in the UK have collapsed. Wholesale gas prices doubled in the first half of the year, then another 70 per cent in August.

It’s currently about 500 per cent higher than a year ago. Europe bet that Vladimir Putin needed their half-a-billion customers more than they needed his gas...

Mr Putin, as is his wont, saw the situation differently, and has been playing on-again off-again with the gas pedal. So, if you’re in the European Commission building in Brussels and you’re about to issue a strong statement about Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border, don’t be surprised if the lights go out ten minutes later.

As for wind energy, Boris Johnson, you’ll recall, proclaimed that the United Kingdom would be the Saudi Arabia of wind.

No sooner were they out of his mouth than they dropped to the floor as an eerie stillness descended on these islands. Since then no wind has blown. Wind speeds are at their lowest for some six decades.

The Good Lord has chosen to afflict us with a total lack of anything more than a light breeze, the occasional semi-zephyr. Well, it’s either God or Chairman Xi in Beijing switching off the wind machine.

But if you’re one of the many Britons who likes to spend the weekend with a pair of binoculars watching the local wind turbines fillet rare species of birds you’re all out of luck.

By the way, it doesn’t have to be openly hostile fellows like Putin lowering you into the deep freeze. Even some dinky metrosexual globalist like Emanuel Macron is happy to threaten to cut off the electricity to Jersey. Britain, through a combination of climate-change posturing and geostrategic carelessness, seems among western powers to have made its energy supply uniquely vulnerable.

First there was the Coronavirus. That led to the somewhat eccentric decision by western nations to tank their own economies.

Amazingly, the near total cessation of economic activity had all kinds of real-world consequences. In 2020 the UK economy shrank by ten per cent – the worst contraction since the Great Frost of 1709.

By contrast, China, which unleashed Covid on the world, more or less uniquely managed to grow its economy in 2020 – and has been sufficiently flush with cash to buy up all the gas it needs at any price.

There have been a lot of dogs that didn’t bark in the age of Covid: It turns out tens of millions of people are quite content to have the state tell them how long they’re permitted to leave their homes for a daily constitutional.

There are a lot of niche issues, often around our leaders’ hypocrisy, but a cynical electorate seems to take it as read that the PM will be awash in wine and cheese even as he bans it for you. But heating your home – especially if the government orders you to stay in it for weeks on end – is about as basic as it gets.

What do you think? Are Boris' pipe dreams leaving Britons in the cold?