I fear that many politicians still don’t understand the enormity of the energy bill catastrophe for families and businesses.

Energy bills will soon become utterly unaffordable for most people - especially when combined with other price increases, like food and mortgage repayments.

Whilse the proposals by Liz Truss to cut taxes are welcome, those tax reductions are not going to be sufficient to tackle this impending catastrophe, not least for those who are earning below the tax thresholds.

The only realistic proposal is for the government to freeze energy costs at the current capped unit price levels for all consumers - households and businesses - and for the government to pick up the difference in price.    

It should announce straight away that it will do so until the end of March 2023.    

I appreciate this is not an easy solution - especially for a Conservative. 

For a start, this solution comes at an eye-watering cost - by all accounts £30 billion for six months - and then there is no guarantee energy prices will be affordable in six months time, therefore requiring further expensive interventions at that point.    

However, the single biggest factor of these high energy costs stem from governments around the world - including our own - introducing idiotic blanket lockdowns during the Covid pandemic, then re-opening the economy at the same time.

This surge in demand was always going to have a huge inflationary impact on prices of goods and energy.   

Given that the government bears that responsibility, it now lies with them to sort out the mess they created, and support the public and businesses through this torrid time.

Clearly the war in Ukraine is now making a bad situation even worse, and there is no sense that a resolution to that conflict will be coming anytime soon.   

Smaller interventions won’t touch the sides, will rapidly be seen as wholly inadequate, and will only lead to the government being under constant pressure to do more.

When faced with a big issue like this, small incremental steps are never going to work. You have to go in big and bold and get ahead of the curve.   

As a believer in a small state, low taxes and personal responsibility, proposing this solution goes against my political philosophy, but politics is not about protecting your ideological purity. 

It is about doing the right thing for your constituents and the country and finding practical solutions to problems.