Parliament is on pause

Politics is in suspended animation. The only proceedings in parliament are the tens of thousands of mourners moving through Westminster Hall as the Queen lies in state.

Party politics was always going to pause after the monarch’s death. But what the planning could not have anticipated was the moment at which the politics would halt. Parliament learned of the Queen’s declining health just as a new prime minister was announcing what may turn out to be the biggest single fiscal intervention in peacetime history. Liz Truss’s plan to cap average household energy bills at £2,500 for the next two years could cost more than £100 billion – equivalent to abolishing the basic rate of income tax for a year.

But before this package could be properly scrutinised by MPs, the Speaker informed the House of the Queen’s condition and from that moment everyone’s attention was concentrated on Balmoral. Once the Queen’s death was announced, Truss’s intervention – more costly than the furlough – was confined to other news.

Instead of defending the policy, Truss found herself leading a nation in mourning, and instead of attacking the new Tory leader, the Labour party joined the political truce that has followed the Queen’s death.

It is not just the pause in politics that has led to a lack of scrutiny of the energy package. The government chose to announce the plan as part of a general debate rather than a ministerial statement. This meant that MPs had no opportunity to question the government directly about the plan other than by intervening when Truss was opening the debate or when Jacob Rees-Mogg was closing it.

The second problem is that there have been no official forecasts of how much the policy will cost and no clear statement of how the government intends to pay for it.