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And there could be worse to come much worse when the prices energy suppliers can charge are lifted again in January. More than eight million families face being plunged into fuel poverty, a status which kicks in when more than ten per cent of disposable income goes on paying for power.

Businesses are not covered by any kind of cap at all and face astronomic energy price hikes. Some will be able to pass the rise on to customers. Others, especially small businesses, will simply go to the wall.

This scale of price increase for an essential commodity dwarfs the impact of measures that we normally get worked up about at the time of a Budget, when Chancellors can run into big trouble for adding a couple of hundred pounds to tax bills.

So one might expect the Government to be ready with a new package of measures to cushion the blow. But news of the latest fuel bill carnage has come as Boris Johnson is serving out his final days as premier and before LizTruss, his likely successor, has taken office.

Both did their best on Friday to offer reassurance. Johnson rightly set the crisis in the context of Vladimir Putins aggression in Ukraine and his subsequent suspension of most of Russias gas supplies to Europe.

He pointed to measures already announced that will channel hundreds of pounds extra to families. Every domestic bill payer is going to get a 400 discount paid in instalments between October and next March. In addition, eight million most vulnerable households will get further support, including a payment of 650 for those on means-tested benefits, 300 for pensioner households and 150 to those on certain disability benefits.

This, said Johnson, amounted to a pipeline of cash that stretches out throughout the autumn. Yet all this support was put in place earlier in the year to help families cope with the last round of price increases. It is a testament to Johnsons ability as a communicator that he offered reassurance that extra support would be coming soon to help with the latest enormous rise. But there was no point in anyone asking him what that might be because it wont be down to him to decide.

On September 6, Ms Truss is set to take office facing the most formidable array of crises any new premier has encountered since Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Every indicator seems to be heading in the wrong direction from general inflation to ambulance response times, the migrant crisis to an upsurge in violent crime.

Yet all these things are dwarfed by the impact of soaring increases in wholesale energy prices.

So Ms Truss must prioritise energy policy from day one, not just in an emergency Budget in mid-September, but right away in a stand-alone package.

Perhaps some of the MPs who chose to dump Johnson may be experiencing second thoughts now that a national crisis to match the scale of the Covid pandemic is in sight. It hardly seems an ideal time for a novice to take the reins.

So Truss needs to get a big call right if her premiership is not to unravel very quickly. Her inner-circle is divided between those who want her to confine extra state support to pensioners and the poor and those who believe the energy crisis is so severe that middle-income families must be included as well.

Ideologically she is likely to be inclined to the former view, preferring radical measures to increase energy supply, along with tax cuts and rhetoric about more hard graft to point those on average incomes towards a method of cushioning the living standards blow by themselves.

But millions of hardworking families in the middle of the income scale will not take kindly to being left out in the cold. The lesson of recent years from the financial crisis to Covid is that governments are well-advised to respond early and at a scale which bolsters public confidence.

Ms Truss on Friday wrote that she would not just throw taxpayers money at problems as a quick fix. She is right to identify higher growth as the long-term way out of the living standards slump.

But to underfund a fiscal package in the meantime would amount to the ultimate false economy plunging the UK into a deep recession while leaving key groups of voters feeling abandoned. There might be no coming back from that.

Read more:
Truss must think and spend big to solve energy crisis, says PATRICK O'FLYNN - Express