In the hierarchy of factors that will make consumers curse politicians and company bosses this summer, food price inflation probably ranks higher than holiday flight chaos. But both will contribute to an ugly mood that will manifest everywhere from Question Time audiences and airport voxpops to outbreaks of mass shoplifting. And only the last blip of both irritants can truly be blamed on what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz.
A thinktank report grabbed headlines on Monday with the claim that UK food prices could be 50 per cent higher by November than they were at the onset of the cost-of-living crisis in 2021. But that’s not a particularly startling figure, given that ONS statistics for the five years to November 2025 already showed a 38.6 per cent surge and that shoppers saw spikes in lamb, beef, coffee and chocolate, to name a few, long before the current blockade of Gulf fertiliser cargoes added potential supplements to a longer shopping list.
For some global food commodities, drought, flood and crop failure have been decade-long drivers of price rises. For domestic produce, policy choices are the bigger culprits, including rises in minimum wages and NIC, unreformed business rates, eco packaging rules, and restrictions on seasonal migrant workers. Add to all that the disdain of successive governments both for grumpy farmers and for the concept of national food security – and we’re left importing almost half the food we eat, at prices afflicted by every geopolitical flare-up or climate event.
Ministers may try to blame the madness of President Trump or ‘supermarket profiteering’ for the coming checkout shock. But the truth is we cooked most of this stew for ourselves.
Grounded
You might think jet fuel is another commodity the global supply of which is largely beyond national control. So why is the UK reported to be ‘particularly vulnerable’ to possible shortages? Because we rely on imports for almost two-thirds of our needs, a deficit twice as big as that of any other European nation – and when any market is suddenly tight, foreign holders are bound to attend to their own needs first.
Behind this is a radical reduction in UK oil refinery capacity, from 18 plants a generation ago to just four – which have belatedly been told by ministers to maximise jet fuel output, while airlines have been told they won’t lose valuable slots at UK airports if they cancel flights for lack of fuel. We just have to hope that the likes of easyJet, Jet2 and Ryanair have been smarter in securing supplies and hedging costs for this summer than governments have been in building national resilience against the inevitability of just such a disruption.
Rolls of honour
My long weekend was largely absorbed in reading Streetwise, a memoir by Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs who was admired for his steady hand during the 2008 crash but later became a hate-figure for anti–capitalist protestors. I’ll be reviewing the book elsewhere but suffice to say here that for a postal worker’s son who rose from trading-floor obscurity to head one of the world’s most potent financial institutions, Blankfein is surprisingly good at self-mockery. Only occasionally do we sense the sinew that took him to the top, in nuggets of advice such as ‘in moments of organisational chart ambiguity, try simply acting like you’re in charge anyway’.
As a long-time observer of the awe and fear that attaches to the name of Goldman Sachs, I might wish Blankfein had been as frank about his firm’s moral ambiguities as he is about the challenging episodes of his own career. But I’m grateful to him for a timely reminder, following the triumph of the King’s recent visit, of just how backward some Americans really believe the UK to be. When Blankfein was posted to London in 1997, his wife sent a shipping container to their rented Kensington home filled with ‘everything we’d have needed if we were spending the year camping off the grid, including… 600 rolls of American toilet paper’. When they left, they bequeathed 520 ‘top-quality’ rolls to the next tenant.
On the jabs
Spot the connection to this next item. Arriving late for a clubland lunch, I joined three trenchermen deep in discussion as to whether to order ‘the dangerous fifth bottle’. But one demurred, on the grounds that he was ‘on the jabs’ and trying to shed a few pounds. I felt obliged to admit that I too had recently taken to stabbing myself in the thigh – and off we went on the most-repeated middle-class -conversation of 2026 (after ‘Starmer is toast’, that is) about the efficacy of the weight-loss drug Mounjaro and the embarrassment of its most common side-effect, summed up by my club chum as: ‘Wherever you are, make sure you’ve spotted the closest loo, even if it’s the Ladies.’
Am I recommending the treatment? Not so far. My trousers are a notch looser but only at the cost of queasiness, dead taste-buds and disrupted sleep: I doubt I’ll last the course. More appropriate to this column, are we all too late to cash in? The US pharma giant Eli Lilly doubled its first-quarter profits on the strength of worldwide Mounjaro sales up 125 per cent, but you’d need to have bought shares three years ago to have struck gold. Likewise, shares in Novo Nordisk of Denmark, maker of the rival Wegovy product preferred by the NHS, have plunged from a 2024 peak.
Lateral thinking suggests buying shares in breath-mint manufacturers (such as Nestlé, owner of Polo) that will benefit from a halitosis epidemic among two million belching UK jabbers. Or in cinema chains such as Everyman Media that are gaining customers who duck out of dinner. Better perhaps to save the £40 cost of a weekly Mounjaro dose towards your inflated family grocery bill or flightless summer staycation.
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