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TREVOR KAVANAGH

This is an energy crisis, Boris – stick solar panels where sun don’t shine

FORGET about Partygate, Carriegate and Downing Street BYOB orgies. They are sideshows compared with the perfect storm about to crash on No10, whoever is Prime Minister.

A £2,000-a-year energy bill bombshell will hit house-holders, millions of them Sun readers, like a brutal kick in the teeth.

We rely on windmills, becalmed for days on end, and on solar energy where the sun don’t shine, says Trevor Kavanagh
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We rely on windmills, becalmed for days on end, and on solar energy where the sun don’t shine, says Trevor Kavanagh
Boris has somersaulted dramatically over energy supplies, but to be fair so has every prime minister from Tony Blair onward
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Boris has somersaulted dramatically over energy supplies, but to be fair so has every prime minister from Tony Blair onwardCredit: PA

They will be paying through the nose for a gamble denounced as “green crap” by ex-PM David Cameron — and derided by Boris Johnson until he won the December 2019 election.

Through no fault of their own, voters face higher taxes, dearer mortgages and shockingly high fuel bills.

For some, it will mean a choice between heating and eating, selling their homes at a loss and watching their businesses go bust.

Nor will their anger be appeased by £200 loans or bailouts with their own money.

They are carrying the cost of Boris Johnson’s vow at last year’s COP26 carbon emissions summit that Britain will be among the first to hit zero.

The issue is set to boil over as the Just Stop Oil nutters threaten to block refineries, paralyse tanker deliveries and pile the agony on motorists.

In an understated message to wide-eyed supporters, Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam said: “You have an absolute responsibility to take action on the greatest act of injustice and obscene evil in the history of humanity.

“What other description can we give to COP26, which knowingly decided to condemn the next generation to a world that is uninhabitable. A world of starvation, rape and slaughter.”

On past performance, the Woke Police will stand by with arms folded and offer them hot chocolate and blankets.

“It’s like designing a little mini-holiday,” Hallam added.

As with so many recent disasters, this crisis was totally avoidable.

Thanks to a cult-like green obsession, Britain is paying for costly imported fuel rather than harvesting an untapped ocean of frackable gas and North Sea oil.

Far from using our own cheap energy, we are being manipulated like puppets by malicious Kremlin tyrant Vladimir Putin.

Boris has somersaulted dramatically over energy supplies, but to be fair so has every prime minister from Tony Blair onward.

They all ignored warnings the lights would go out without reliable new power plants, especially nuclear.

To save a few quid, they scrapped gas storage units, leaving us with only three days’ supply in an emergency.

So we rely on windmills, becalmed for days on end, and on solar energy where the sun don’t shine.

Meanwhile, billions in taxpayers’ cash has been poured into dodgy green subsidies to rich landowners, which end up as a hidden tax on domestic fuel bills.

The PM’s wife, green goddess Carrie Johnson, is feeling the heat, perhaps unfairly.

Her obsession is with animals and gay rights, not gas and electricity.

Those with real influence are BoJo’s father, Stanley, and billionaire green fanatic Zac Goldsmith, a minister in the House of Lords.

Along with Carrie, who once worked for Goldsmith, they are known as the Zac Pack.

There is a powerful case for renewable energy, already on stream with commercially viable new technology.

But before we swallow Hallam’s doom-laden images of global meltdown, let’s recall the equally overblown “worst case” Covid fantasies from Sage scientists.

“Bonking” Professor Neil Ferguson terrified us into lock-down with ludicrous forecasts of half a million dead.

Critics fear a similar panic over climate change will destroy the global economy — with consequences for us all.

Right now, 70million UK citizens are being given a glimpse of that future as they plunge into the worst cost- of-living-crisis in half a century.

But this is not the 1970s. Back then we were accustomed to non-stop industrial strife, with wages chasing prices. Inflation was a fact of life.

Today, we’re used to stability, cheap food and fuel, low mortgages and full employment — a fool’s paradise, it now seems.

“Things are going to be difficult,” admits Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng yesterday, the minister who banned fracking in 2019.

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“Difficult” doesn’t quite cut it.

Once gas and electricity bills start to land on doormats, the green crap really will hit the fan.

Political witch-hunt

LABOUR’s Sir Keir Starmer never fails to exploit his role as ex-state prosecutor and champion of human rights.

So Boris Johnson was right to recall how he prosecuted two dozen innocent Sun journalists on trumped-up conspiracy charges – while failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile.

All 24 journalists were exonerated after the costliest police operation in Scotland Yard history – a humiliating defeat for the Crown Prosecution Service.

Many believe Starmer’s knighthood and safe Labour seat were a reward for what was seen as a political witch-hunt. Had his persecution succeeded, the freedom of the Press to expose wrongdoing by those in power would have been left in tatters.

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