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. If gas is short this winter, we’ll need all EDF’s non-gas-fired kit working at full capacity and we’ll also need the co-operation of RTE, the French national grid operator, to supply extra power when we most need it through two cross-Channel interconnectors.

In normal times, electricity is France’s second-largest export to the UK, after ‘beverages’. The current has recently been flowing the other way, from us to them, because half of France’s nuclear stations were shut down for maintenance in May and some are not expected to restart until November. But in the coldest spells, when supplies are tight and nuclear engineers are in high demand on both sides, how keen do you think the French will be to share resources if our prime minister has said their president’s a potential foe?