Voices: Who needs an emergency Budget when we have Rishi Sunak’s EU rules shredding video?

In October, people’s energy bills are going to rise by 60 per cent, having already risen 50 per cent in March. The average bill will have risen to at least £3,500 a year. And it will rise again in January.

So what’s the government doing about this? Boris Johnson has said, via a spokesperson, that he won’t be doing anything. There’ll be no more policy announcements from him. The chancellor? It’s not clear whether or not we actually have one.

We know there’ll be an “emergency Budget” in September, because both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have said there will be, but both of them have declined to reveal what will be in it. So that’s an emergency Budget, that’s going to happen exactly two weeks before the emergency starts, which everyone will have known about for at least seven months by that point, which will certainly be too late to prevent it.

Liz Truss has spent the weekend saying that she will go about sorting out the problem in a “Conservative” way. She won’t say exactly how, other than that it won’t involve “handouts” but rather tax cuts. This is somewhat unfortunate. The median UK household income is about £31,000. And the average bill for a normal size house is going to be £3,500, more than double the amount it was a year ago.

Where is Liz Truss going to find tax cuts that will save someone who earns £31,000, or indeed two people who earn £31,000 between them, the required two grand a year to get them back where they started? Naturally she has no idea, because it cannot be done. Which is why all she can do is talk about the fact there’ll be an “emergency Budget” then hope that will do to pass another day, and get closer to the finish line.

You would think, would you not, that this kind of madness would make life easier for Rishi Sunak? But no. He has other ideas. What would be in his emergency Budget? Well, it’s tough for him in a way because he was the actual chancellor not that long ago, and he has already released various plans to deal with the problem, none of which go far enough. And, sadly for him, he doesn’t appear to be quite shameless enough to just claim to have had nothing to do with anything for the last three years and ultimately that is what will cost him.

Instead, he’s had his team work up some new content and it is, without question, the worst, most agonising 64 seconds of political marketing, quite possibly of all time. There is a growing sense, everywhere, of not being able to understand why this neverending contest drags on and on and none of it ever doing anything to address the growing terror sweeping the country. And enter Sunak, at 10am on a Monday morning, to let us know he cares by having commissioned a new video of a faceless man wheeling a shredder around an office and then, to the sound of Beethoven’s ninth symphony – the European Union’s anthem – shredding EU legislation.

Look, you don’t necessarily have to love the European Union, but a lot of people have done. Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor, had that piece played at his funeral while he lay there with an EU flag over his coffin. And here really was the man who would be prime minister, tasking one of his interns with the job of knocking up some passable video content featuring that song and some paper going through a shredder.

There’s barely any point going into the details. That, yes, some EU laws and regulations have been kept on by the government, mainly because it makes it easier to carry on buying and selling food and medicines with our nearest neighbours and biggest market. That reviewing EU legislation is something that’s already been done, by and large.

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Naturally, the most depressing aspect is that there had been, for many people, some vague hope that the passing on of the great clown-in-chief might also mark a kind of moment at which the boring, demeaning, juvenile politics he brought with him might also move on too.

That certainly isn’t happening. Fully six years on from the referendum, and it is still the case that the best they’ve got is to point at Brussels and blame the EU for everything.

Why Sunak is doing this is anybody’s guess. He knows he’s lost. Why he is still carrying on, meticulously setting fire to the final unscorched remains of his credibility, only he can know, though the truth is that he probably doesn’t have a clue either.

So all you can do in the meantime is sit back, definitely don’t relax and hope there’ll be something in this emergency budget for you and try not to pay attention to anything either candidate does or says. It will only make things worse.