Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Oscar

Vincent and I'm joined today by Tim Schittman and Michael Simmons. Now, Tim, in your poll call,

you write about how the panic has set in in the Treasury about this energy crisis and the fears

around history repeating itself.

Can you take us inside?

Yeah, I mean, look, the echoes are pretty obvious.

People have been saying for weeks closing the Straits of Hormuz,

that's we're back to 1973 in the OPEC oil shock.

There's a few differences, but I was finally prompted to write about this

when the cabinet minister

literally said to me, we're into 1973 territory now.

There was a COBRA meeting on Monday in which the Treasury, the Prime Minister and various

other luminaries, including the Governor of the Bank of England, sat down to work out the implications

of a continuing energy price shock, possible. I mean, all prices are,

Michael will correct me. When I wrote this piece, they're about $96 a barrel. They've been higher

than that during this crisis, but the government sort of mean, you know, sort of middling,

middle-rank estimate is that if it carries on for several months, then we're looking at $150

a barrel and potentially as high as 200. And that has a truly catastrophic effect, not just on

the cost of living, but the cost of transport, which pushes up the price of food. It means we're

back into inflation. Now, we're some way from having a sort of 70s inflation shock.

It's currently 3% and holding steady. We're expecting that to rise in the next quarter.

It hit 24% in the 1970s. But we're in a much worse position in terms of the debt picture than we were then.

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