Even if Boris Johnson survives the fortnight, the economy will finish him off

But it’s also worth paying attention to the less sensational bits of PMQs, as they offer a glimpse of what this unrepentant Prime Minister believes will help him get away with his serial lying.

Last week, he took every opportunity to talk about jobs and the economy, claiming that it was an “astonishing fact” there are now 420,000 more people “in work” than before the pandemic, while the economy was the fastest growing in the G7 – themes he returned to on Wednesday.

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These are yet more misrepresentations from the Downing Street deceiver: there are 409,000 more people on employer payrolls than before the pandemic, says fact-checking charity Full Fact, but overall there are 600,000 fewer people in work because the figure Mr Johnson quotes ignores the self-employed. The rapid growth of the UK economy, meanwhile, reflects the fact that it shrank more than most other rich nations during the pandemic and has taken longer to recover to its pre-pandemic levels.

Mr Johnson may hope that misleading over his government’s economic record will save him.

But the reality is that even if he manages to survive until the end of the coming fortnight, it’s the economy that’s likely to finish him off, due to the truly frightening cost-of-living crisis.

The enormity of this has been laid out starkly by the Bank of England, which reports that inflation has hit 5.4 per cent, the highest figure since 1992; it could climb to seven per cent by April.

Food prices are going up and eye-watering domestic energy increases are predicted when the price cap is adjusted in April, with trade body Energy UK warning it will mean a price hike of 45 to 50 per cent for customers. A national insurance increase also kicks in in April.

Are wages keeping pace? Hardly: they’re growing at the rate of one tenth of a percentage point a year. The Resolution Foundation think tank says 2022 will be “the year of the squeeze”, and predicts a “cost-of-living catastrophe” in April, estimating that a typical household will have to find an extra £1,200 this year because of those tax rises and gas prices.

The fuel costs will hit the poorest the hardest, it says, with the share of income spent on energy bills among the poorest households three times the share spent by the richest households.

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For some people, the cost-of-living squeeze will mean no foreign holiday this year. But for others, it will mean letting ice form inside their windows. That Dickensian scene is already the reality of some people’s lives.

The writer and activist Jack Monroe, a single parent, has for the last decade kept close tabs on supermarket costs. Monroe notes that the lowest priced essentials that families like hers rely on have gone up much more than 5.4 per cent.

A 500g bag of pasta in her local supermarket, one of the Big Four, was 29p this time last year and is now 70p. The cheapest rice was 45p for a 1kg last year but £1 for 500g now.

As a result of all this, some people will simply buy less food. Richard Walker runs supermarket chain Iceland. He told the BBC food bank use was going up: “We’re losing customers to hunger.”

How have we ended up back here so soon after the dark days of the credit crunch and austerity? It’s not all Boris Johnson’s fault. The gas price rise is caused by high global demand for energy and also depleted reserves as a result of gas stores being used up last winter during the cold snap. There are also concerns that the Russian president could be withholding gas reserves for political reasons, though he denies it. The UK is particularly hard hit by this crisis because it uses gas so widely in domestic heating and to generate electricity.

The national insurance rise is an attempt to deal with the cost of social care in England, a problem that was unaddressed for far too long prior to the pandemic (Scotland will get a proportion of revenues from the tax to spend on health and social care here). But an income tax rise would have been more progressive: this levy is going to hit working folk on modest incomes hard.

And then there’s the Universal Credit cut. It was worth £1000 a year to qualifying households. The Conservatives may yet rue the day they voted to remove it.

Brexit has made things worse. The higher costs associated with trading across the Channel, and worker shortages, such as in food processing and HGV driving, have driven some of price rises we’ve seen.

The SNP can point to its Scottish Child Payment as a helpful policy for families on low incomes, but they too have set the scene for higher taxes at an awkward moment, by removing the cap on the council tax rises that local authorities can impose. Councils, who say ministers have cut their resource funding by £100m in real terms, may hold down funding this year because of the local elections in May, but we can expect a hit next year.

With incomes being squeezed but public services crying out for cash, both the Edinburgh and London governments, you might observe, are in a bind. But the Conservatives, who have done astonishingly little about this crisis so far, appear to assign it a low priority. So much for levelling up.

It also poses questions about the green transition. This crisis makes the importance of improving the insulation of British homes, to reduce fuel demand, ever more pressing. A nation where households used heat pumps instead of gas to keep warm would no longer be at the mercy of gas price rises, but the expensive transition to that alternative is looking rather harder to achieve with incomes being so stretched.

Some want to see VAT on fuel cut – Labour’s demand – or so-called green levies scrapped, but that doesn’t meet the scale of the problem and would damage those critically important climate change mitigation efforts.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has another idea. It says that a projected increase in benefits due this year, of 3.1 per cent – in line with inflation as it was in September – needs to be doubled to reflect the actual rate of inflation predicted for April. Without it, the poorest face a three per cent income squeeze. That’s on top of the Universal Credit cut. Pensioners must not be left behind.

And a windfall tax on the oil and gas industry to help mitigate the energy price increase? The UK government has ruled out this appealing Labour proposal.

But they’d better do something, and quick, because voters who are already infuriated by Boris Johnson’s dishonesty, will not forgive him for leaving children cold and hungry.

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