Like the winter of discontent, the summer of 2022 is a season that will burn itself into the national consciousness. Predictions of a dark (in all senses of the word) future are daily occurrences. All but the wealthy wonder how they will cope with the hard times that are almost on us. The sense we’re in a runaway crisis is everywhere.

Everywhere, that is, except among the leaders of our self-indulgent government. It has shirked its duty to lead the country and preferred to take a long, lazy holiday instead. For Boris Johnson, a redundant prime minister serving out his notice period, his life consists of Mediterranean jaunts. For Liz Truss and her supporters, it consists of lying back, like a sunbather on a beach, and soaking up the warm reassurance that comes when like-minded dogmatists confirm each other’s prejudices.

The gulf between the leaders of the country and the majority of citizens is wider than at any time since the over-confident David Cameron called the Brexit referendum.

To stay only with the latest dire news, the typical energy bill will rise to £3,554 a year from October to £4,650 in January. What are we meant to do when faced with increases on that scale? Putting on an extra jumper or cooking one-pot meals are laughably ineffective responses. Not just the already poor but also the broad mass of working and middle-class people cannot see a way out.

Perhaps the government thinks its citizens should not heat their homes or cook their food at all. Thousands are already tightening their belts, and the summer is not over yet. GPs and charity organisers report cases of people unable to cook the meals food banks gave them, or using candles to save money on electricity bills. Some families are ‘just taking food they can use a microwave [for] so they don’t have to use an oven,’ one told the i newspaper.

Meanwhile 1.7 million consumers have cancelled their direct debit payments to energy companies and many more will follow. Their suppliers could send round the debt collectors or force them to use top-up prepayment meters. As many will soon find out, rates for meters are often hundreds of pounds a year more expensive than monthly tariffs, because it is an iron law of modern Britain that the less you have the more you pay.

We are told that the rich are obsessed with money. But their infatuation is as nothing when set against the relentless calculations of those who must mentally count out every penny they spend in advance. People who never thought they would need charity and could not imagine, even a year ago, that their food and heating could ever become unaffordable, are doing that mental arithmetic now.

Inflation could hit 18 per cent next year, reliable economists predict. Real wages are falling at record rates, the Office of National Statistics reports. The ambulance service and A&E departments are cracking under pressure in August. The chief executive of the NHS Confederation warns of a ‘humanitarian crisis’ come the winter.

A frightened, buffeted population, look to the Conservative party and see only a void where the government of the country should be. Boris Johnson’s successors talk about bringing back grammar schools, fighting the woke, and banning onshore wind farms. Their ideas are not so much bad as wholly irrelevant. So far away are Conservatives from providing effective government, they cannot even compel the water companies they privatised to stop flooding the rivers and beaches with excrement.

Liberals have an aversion to strong rulers. They see their will to power as proto-fascist if they are on the left or a threat to the magical workings of the free market if they are on the right. But just as no one is an atheist in a foxhole, no one is a small-state liberal in a crisis. Voters expect the Conservatives to show they are in control, but see only idleness. They will not forget the summer when their government went absent without leave.

The decline in the Tory poll position, and the high levels of support for strikers who would otherwise be condemned for making life miserable, are signs that the public that has concluded that the causes of its miseries lie closer to the Conservative leadership.

Tory commentators can make an apparently plausible case that we are in a traditional August silly season and predictions of a Conservative collapse are overblown. Theresa May’s pollster James Johnson tells me most of the public isn’t paying attention. Unlike the Republicans in the US who have hammered Joe Biden for allowing inflation to rise, Labour has failed to pin the blame for the cost-of-living crisis on the government. As soon as Truss becomes Prime Minister, voters will take notice, and give the Conservatives the space to reinvent themselves and show what their new prime minister can do,

Labour also expects a Truss bounce, according to an internal memo leaked to the Guardian. But Labour also expects ‘any improvement in the government’s position could be very short-lived,’ and I am sure it is right.

The structural problems of a Truss campaign that will win by appealing to the narrow interest of the Tory right have hemmed her in. Her supporters would not allow her ditch tax cuts that benefit the wealthy and use the money to fund energy subsidies, even if she wanted to.

Beyond personalities, the structural problems left by 12 years of Conservative rule make effective solutions impossible. The Tories cannot make life easier for business by negotiating a better trading relationship with the EU, when it has talked itself into the neurotic belief that any compromise with Brussels is treason. It cannot kick start the economy and give hope to the young paying extortionate rents by building more homes. In short, so unable are our leaders to face our problems squarely they cannot even bring themselves to admit they exist.

The lights will soon be going out all over the UK. If the summer of 2022 has shown us anything, it is that they went out in the Conservative party a long time ago.