Few will be minded to believe Russia’s explanation for cutting off Nord Stream 1 pipeline – that it is a maintenance issue – and I don’t suspect we are expected to believe it, either – any more than we were expected to believe that the would-be Salisbury assassins had an interest in cathedral spires. It is pretty blatant what game Vladimir Putin is playing: Europe has announced, grandly, its intentions to wean itself off Russian gas and oil and Putin has set out to pre-empt that, to cut off the gas while Europe is still pretty much reliant on it.

Gas supplies to Germany from Russia were already down to 20 per cent of the level they were before the Ukraine invasion. No one should count on the gas being turned on again. Eventually, Europe will manage just fine without Russian gas, once we have commissioned more terminals to receive liquified natural gas (LNG) from the US, Qatar and elsewhere. But that will not be this winter.

In February, the West set out on an economic bombardment of Russia, to punish it for the Ukrainian invasion. It has succeeded in many ways, with the Russian economy in deep trouble. But this has been no Cold War-type victory – rather it has been a case of mutually-assured economic destruction. That should have been clear from the outset, yet European governments, in their hubris, failed to anticipate the consequences. They assumed that Russia would carry on selling its oil and gas to Europe even as the West was announcing its intention to end Russian oil and gas imports for good. It was like going to war before the Spitfire factories were open.

Soaring gas prices have exposed another form of hubris, too: that of the UK government in trying to assure us that Britain was not exposed to supply problems from Russia because it was deriving only a small proportion of its gas from Russia (since reduced to zero in June). But of course, we are at the western end of a pipeline which is fed at the east with Russian gas. Of course, we were always going to be exposed to the kind of crisis we are in now.

Britain and Europe face an additional problem which Russia does not: climate protesters who will automatically oppose any initiative to produce more oil and gas in Europe, or to construct infrastructure to import it, either. That, apparently, is leading us down the wrong road and we should be investing in more wind and solar instead. Except that in 2019 wind and solar accounted for just 4.2 per cent of Britain’s total energy needs – and, in the absence of more than a token amount of energy storage, we are absolutely reliant on gas power stations to fill in when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining.

True, it takes time to bring new oil and gas capacity on line. But we are decades away from constructing energy self-sufficiency based on renewables. We are already waging economic war with Russia, and not winning. To keep the lights on, the government is going to have to win the battle against Just Stop Oil and all others who are opposed to any investment in oil and gas.