Europe’s “chilly winter” is fast becoming “another Millennium bug”, says Ross Clark in The Spectator – a “much-feared disaster that never transpires”. Just a few weeks after dire warnings of blackouts and energy rationing, wholesale gas prices have “plummeted” to below €100 per megawatt hour. That’s “less than a third of their peak in August”. Why? Consumers are being more careful; energy usage is 7% lower than normal. The mild weather is helping. All this is allowing Europe to stock up on liquified natural gas (LNG). There’s now so little storage space that around 50 LNG ships are “queuing off European coasts”. Importing LNG is less efficient than piping in gas, so prices are still double what they were. But “the winter is not likely to be as chilly as it was feared”.

“As a British Asian of the same generation, intense feelings overwhelm me when I see Rishi Sunak cross the door into 10 Downing Street,” says Janan Ganesh in the FT. “All that envy and bitterness will pass, though.” People hope he’ll provide a “restoration of competence”, largely because he understands the “folly of unfunded tax cuts”. But Sunak has “crammed a lot of misjudgments into a short career”. His Eat Out to Help Out pandemic scheme incentivised people to dine together when there was no vaccine in sight. And, unlike the Remainer Liz Truss and the opportunist Boris Johnson, he “believed with real fervour that Brexit was a good idea”. So how does he explain all the lost trade and forfeited government income?