Will energy bills kill off working from home?

‘The jury’s out’, was Liz Truss’s pert response to the question ‘Macron: friend or foe?’ at last week’s Norwich hustings. ‘I’ll judge him on deeds not words.’ In a video clip of the event you can see a bald bloke in the second row applauding wildly, as if she had just delivered from memory the whole of Henry V’s speech before Agincourt. Hard to know which is worse: whether as Foreign Secretary she thinks it’s shrewd diplomacy to cast doubt on the bona fides of our nearest ally and Europe’s only current statesman; or whether, even with victory in the bag, she’ll say anything to win the vote of every last backwoods xenophobe in the Tory party.

OK, I’m a committed Francophile – and yes of course their peacock president can be a bit annoying. But let’s focus on the coming energy crisis. The French state-owned utility giant EDF owns the eight nuclear reactors still in service in the UK plus a forest of wind farms, accounting for 30 per cent of UK low-carbon energy generation.