Coffee House Shots is sponsored by EDF, Britain's biggest generator of zero carbon electricity.

Find out how we are busy helping Britain achieve net zero at www.edufenergy.com. Hello and welcome to coffee house shots of spectators' daily politics podcast. I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by James Fusciph and Fraser Nelson.

And we're facing warnings that the gas crisis in the markets cause a free day week and that Christmas could be affected to if not cancelled.

James, what's behind the headlines?

So gas prices are going up. Various of the energy companies that supply cheap energy to households

are going bust and the more established bigger energy companies are saying to government,

well, if you want us to take on these customers, we want some guarantees on prices, then they

are basically pushing

for government support for them. Now, I think this is one of the things that makes it difficult

to tell how serious the situation is, because it's obviously in the interest of these energy

companies to talk up how bad things are and how bad things might get to try and pressure the

government into giving them

more money. I think one of the things has happened is the pandemic has created such a kind of

expectation that the government has intervened more directly in the economy than it has in decades.

And I think businesses are still in that mindset, although there's some external factor going on,

largely out of our control.

It's difficult and troublesome,

and the government should offer us support.

And I think it'd be interesting to see what happens here,

whether the government does provide extra money or not.

So I think that at the moment you've got,

the energy companies trying to say the situation

...