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Hello and welcome to a special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by James Forsyfe and Kate Andrews.

And we're here to talk about the effing crisis. No, that's not me trying not to completely swear in front of James Forsyth so he doesn't blush.

That is the new term as disclosed by James in his Times column, for the crisis that the government is

most concerned about, effing. There's energy, fuel and food. Perfect storm of factors that

means that despite the Tories leading in the polls, ministers are very nervous leading up to the winter.

James, we've had a lot about fuel shortages this week, but bigger picture, why are they so concerned?

They're concerned because even cabinet optimists think that you are going to get flare-ups of these supply chain crises throughout the autumn

because there is fundamentally a shortage of HGV drivers, Lorry drivers in this country,

and pretty much everything in this country goes at least the final bit of a journey by Lorry. So if you don't have enough Lorry drivers, lorry drivers in this country, and pretty much everything in this country goes

at least the final bit of a journey by lorry. So if you don't have enough lorry drivers,

you're going to have problems in terms of having enough of stuff. So energy is the rising gas

prices, which are a global phenomenon. And that is only going to get worse. Just look at the

news this week that the Chinese government have told Chinese energy companies secure supplies by whatever price necessary. I think this

energy crunch that you are seeing hitting the UK and the EU economy is going to get more pronounced.

Then you have got fuel, which you've seen at the moment. We still haven't, I mean, things are less bad than they were, and it is not as bad as

the kind of pre-COVID panic buying because there's a limit, basically, most people store fuel

in the tank of their car, and once they filled that up, they don't fill up again.

But given you haven't got enough HGV drivers, you're going to be running permanently on a lower level of supply than you would be comfortable with. And third is food. You know,

Christmas is a big strain on the food supply chain even in normal times. And those,

those supply chains are under particular pressure because lots of those industries relied on

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