Supermarkets are removing ‘use by’ dates on yoghurts and other products, saying if it smells off, don’t eat it.

Here’s something that’s been in the fridge for 12 years and definitely doesn’t pass the smell test. Stinks something rotten, there’s mould on the top and the added ingredients – rampant free-market capitalism, entitlement and riches, self-serving additives, neglect of the state and, fittingly enough for a yoghurt, a hefty dollop of culture wars – aren’t helping.

Yup, that’s a Tory yoghurt at the back of the fridge.

Just now, Boris Johnson is on a tone-deaf ‘victory lap’ of the country. The un-chippable crust of chutzpah coating that man is quite something, but at least the Daily Express is on side, with its splash headline today: “Farewell… I’m proud of the things we did.”

Ah yes, those 126 crimes in Downing Street and the first prime minister to be convicted of a crime, Brexit costing an unending fortune with no discernible benefits, billions doled out in dodgy Covid contracts to Tory-friendly companies, some 200,000 people dead in the pandemic.

All down to a deliberately divisive and indolent right-winger who hid behind clownish bumbling and a pretend name of Boris, a persona he is said to have put on while at Eton and has worn ever since, trying to fool us all.

Yes, those successes.

And what does this stinky yoghurt pot of a government have to say about the mounting energy crisis: nothing, not a word, just empty tax-cutting mantras from likely next prime minister Liz ‘No Handouts’ Truss, as selected by a dusty coterie of Tory party members who long ago lost their ability to smell when something is off.

The energy crisis is truly scary for everyone, especially for those with little or no spare money, no financial wiggle or hope left. And for the rest of us too ­ – is it even remotely possible to pay 80% more on energy bills?

All we’ve heard so far from last-tour Johnson is that we have to swallow this hard medicine for now, it’s all Putin’s fault, and a golden future lies ahead. Ah, yes, those sunlit uplands again, often promised but always a mirage, an evaporation of hope sold cheap.

Other European countries are already acting, with France limiting energy rises to 4% for a year.

But not ours. Johnson has spent the summer on holiday while his government has disappeared as Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak engage in a sour leadership parade. Just let Tory MPs chose the next time one of their prime ministers ends up being a total liability (and that might be sooner than you think).

The trouble for Conservative governments, especially the shallow, populist variety we get nowadays, is that many of the problems society faces don’t fit their worldview.

The energy crisis shows that the free market in energy is basically oil and gas cartels making billions by providing something everybody needs to survive, essentially holding us all hostage.

And that’s not just a figure pulled from my head: Bloomberg today reports that UK gas producers and electricity generators may make excess profits of as much as £170 billion over the next two years, according to the Treasure estimates that will be waiting in Truss’s over-flowing in-tray. And still our bills shoot up.

How are small businesses such as pubs (or lovely local bars like the one three minutes away from our house) going to survive; how are cash-strapped schools going to stay heated; how will the NHS afford those massive bills?

On the day the new 80% domestic price cap was announced, no government minister was available for the morning round of TV interviews. Not a single one. It was left to the financial expert Martin Lewis, but at least he knows what he’s talking about.

And let’s not forget the stuff that falls from our taps. The water industry, as privatised in 1989, now seems to be in the hands of unaccountable private equity investors, while the firms they control pollute our rivers and spew sewage into the sea (there’s a sobering article by Dr Kate Bayliss, a senior research fellow at the University of Sussex, on The Conversation about this).

Don’t swim in the privatised sea; don’t paddle in that fetid river; and don’t swallow that brownish mineral water.

But do sniff that Tory yoghurt. It’s well off.