While ministers argue, the energy crisis leaves northern industries facing shutdown or worse

It’s a classic Westminster story. Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng says during a TV interview that he’s having meetings with the Treasury about the energy crisis. Oh no he’s not, says the Treasury, as he has barely gone off-camera. Oh yes he is, says the prime minister’s spokesperson.

Who cares, say the people running Britain’s energy-intensive industries – people who are staring down the barrels of a pair of shotguns labelled “shutdown” and “bankruptcy”.

You can understand why the media is in such a froth about who met whom, or who didn’t meet whom; when it happened, if it happened; and the warring cabinet.

Conflict sells, and it is an astonishing, incredible, stunning spectacle to see government departments publicly fighting and contradicting each others’ versions of events in the middle of a national crisis, while the prime minister catches some sun at a luxury resort and keeps in touch by phone.

The trouble is that all this obscures the very real issue businesses are facing: they can’t afford to operate now that gas prices have disappeared off into the stratosphere.

The Treasury’s nervousness about intervening is understandable. The forthcoming spending round will be tough. It wants to get borrowing under control (read “down”). It has a strong aversion to bailouts, which are really what we’re talking about here, because if you step in once, the pressure to do so again, and again, and again will be intense. The banking bailouts proved that.

But the government bears no small amount of responsibility for Britain getting hit harder than most of its near neighbours by an energy crisis that was eminently predictable.

It has for years paid too little attention to energy security. It refused to finance the sort of gas storage capacity much of the continent has. It imposed a hard Brexit, and is now shaking its fist at the EU and threatening a trade war at the worst possible time. So there’ll be no help from that quarter.

The practical case is stronger still. Whatever “levelling up” means – if it means anything beyond being one of the prime minister’s frequent flights of fancy – it won’t be seen for dust in the wake of the trail of devastation the crisis could leave across the energy-intensive industries of the north.

Tens of thousands of the sort of high-paying jobs he says he wants to see more of are poised to vanish like so many will-o’-the-wisps.

According to the union Unite, there are 800,000 direct, skilled jobs at risk, and hundreds of thousands more in related supply chains. “Supply chains”. We’re all becoming very familiar with that term.

There are numerous options available for averting the crisis. I’m told business groups have offered several suggestions in meetings with officials and ministers. They include loans, government guarantees, and more besides. The method doesn’t really matter. What does is that it happens.

A decade ago, when the banking industry was teetering on the brink of collapse, the then Labour government acted.

The consequences of not doing so, as we are often reminded, were a potential horror show: the complete collapse of the global financial system, not to mention the domestic financial services industry. But in the process, tens of thousands of finance-industry jobs, mostly based in the south, were protected.

The current government appears set upon ignoring a crisis enveloping the north. No, it is not going to cause the collapse of the global economy. But the impact on Britain’s could still be profound.

To ignore it would be a pretty poor return on the investment the north has made in Tory party promises.