Any other business: Britain’s chaotic energy policy puts us in Putin’s hands

To have written last month that the headline ‘Kiev in flames’ looked like a black swan on the economic horizon hardly makes me Nostradamus — but sure enough, the tension between Russia and Ukraine have caused stock markets to quiver and the price of UK gas for one-month delivery on the ICE Europe futures exchange in London to rise 10 per cent on Monday. But it was more impressively far-sighted that way back in the winter of 2005/6 we commissioned a Spectator cover showing wicked Vladimir Putin sitting astride a knotted gas pipeline: one sixth of all gas consumed in Europe arrives from Russia across the Ukraine, and another sixth from Russia by other routes. Twice before, Putin has provoked western price spikes by turning off supplies to Ukraine, supposedly for late payment but also as a political warning.

There would have been more market turmoil this week if it wasn’t for the fact that, after a mild winter, our continental neighbours are sitting on their biggest stockpiles of fuel since 2008. Most have invested heavily in gas storage capacity, equivalent in Germany to 100 days’ supply, in France to 15 weeks, in Austria to six months. But let us remind ourselves just how completely prescience, investment and ministerial action have failed to cohere in UK energy provision. Here we can hold just a fortnight’s gas (only Belgium has as little capacity as we do), and last September, for want of a subsidy deal, Centrica abandoned a project to re-use the depleted Baird gas field off the Norfolk coast which would have doubled that capacity.

Meanwhile, in the face of green hysteria and rampant nimbyism, the likelihood of shale gas coming on stream from domestic UK sites any time soon is remote; and there’s barely a spade in the ground at Hinkley Point, where the sole new nuclear station so far signed for, at giant cost, won’t be keeping anybody’s lights on until at least 2023.