I have never experienced anything like it and they, the directly affected, have never seen anything like it. Electricity costs going through the roof, something like £7,000 a year per house and may go even higher. And winter is coming.

I am talking about the UK which is being impacted by high electricity costs far worse, as I can see, than other countries in Europe. Electricity providers are making huge profits and Liz Truss, the probable prime minister as from tomorrow, still refuses to tax these profits with a windfall tax.

So the people will have to pay the highest amount and this will eat into their resources. People are slipping into poverty when they were not expecting it. I heard a man telling LBC he can’t make it – he is divorced and has no car and any job requires him to travel from the small village he lives in. People kill themselves for less.

They have created food banks for such people and now they are creating something analogous to care for those people who do not have the means to cope with the high cost of energy, using heated buildings like schools or halls where people can gather and get out of the cold.

This is not the Britain we know; nor the Britain as described by the mainstream media but it has been getting an airing in the discussions during this leadership contest.

I have been following it and still cannot conclude which candidate I like most. Nor can I predict who will win, although Liz Truss is said to be miles ahead of Rishi Sunak. At the last debate of the campaign on Thursday Sunak gave an impassioned speech which had the delegates on their feet and cheering.

More to the point he warned in not so many words that Truss’s proposals were dangerous and risk getting the markets alarmed and panicking.

Truss aims at continuity with Boris Johnson but the UK is sliding down in the comparability stakes with other countries in Europe especially facing the challenges posed by the Russian retaliation for the sanctions imposed upon it. Britain has enough natural resources to have its own power but over the years it has neglected nuclear power and other means of harnessing energy sources.

Other countries have alternatives such as hydro-electricity and, even so, France is said to be toying with rationing if winter gets colder or longer.

Here in Malta we have none of this angst that is enveloping the British psyche, thanks to the government taking upon itself any increase in the price of fuel, naturally as long as the unit price does not keep going up. We are paying this increase through our taxes anyway.

The EU, caught once again unprepared, will hurriedly bring in changes starting at meetings to be held this week. So too the ECB although the Euro’s weakness compared to the Dollar should help European exports.

As a whole, the EU is proving to be more united and resilient than it was in past years. But the UK seems to be finding that perhaps Brexit was not something as good as it seemed to be at the time. Time and again the problems affecting Britain have been shown to be the direct results of Brexit. Most of them cannot be resolved by a change of laws and those requiring EU approval need the involvement of the 27 member states.

The new British prime minister will have a hard job to do: after persuading the Conservative members of his or her conservatism, he or she must persuade the British electorate in the general election within two years and the conservative appeal must necessarily be diluted to compare with the Labour proposal.

Ultimately however the British public will be pushed to appraise Brexit: was it a good or bad decision? If Brexit is found to have been a bad decision there’ll be hell to pay.

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