With Brent crude up 40 percent since the war in Iran began, ministers have found a warehouse of unused ration books and decided they still look fine.
Oil has held above $100 a barrel as the war in Iran drags on, and Britain has responded by issuing petrol ration coupons it printed in 1973 and never used. Ministers say the books are in excellent condition and have no expiry date. Forecourt staff are being asked to explain perforations to people who have never seen a cheque.
The boxes had been sitting in a disused RAF stores depot outside Bedford since the winter of 1973. Brown cardboard, stencilled with a Ministry of Fuel and Power crest that no longer exists, and never once opened.
On Monday the government opened them. Inside were petrol ration coupons, printed in a hurry during the Arab oil embargo and then quietly shelved when the crisis passed. Ministers have now decided they will do.
Brent crude has settled above $100 a barrel again, as the New York Times reports, and the war in Iran shows no sign of finding a third act. So Britain has reached for the one prop it never got to use.
I have written about this price twice already. First when the war failed to impress its critics, then when the pump boards in Luton ran out of room for the digits. I did not expect the third instalment to open in a warehouse. I should have.
A leftover from the last time
The coupons were printed for a rationing scheme that Edward Heath's government announced and never switched on. Roughly 46 million books were produced. A great many were pulped. The rest were sent to Bedford, where they waited for a country to need them.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero confirmed the plan in a short notice. "The coupons remain in excellent condition," said Piers Harrowgate, a departmental spokesman. "They have no expiry date. Nobody in 1973 thought to add one, and frankly nobody in 1973 expected to be here again either."
He added that the department had considered printing new coupons but found the old ones were "substantially the same document". The only change is a sticker over the words "Ministry of Fuel and Power". The sticker is beige.
Each book allows a driver twenty-six gallons a month. That figure was chosen in 1973 for reasons the department can no longer locate. Officials decided that changing it would require a meeting, and the meeting would require fuel.
Nothing you have not seen before
Analysts have greeted the coupons with the polite boredom of people who have watched this film several times and know where the car chase goes. Giles Fenwick, an energy strategist at Marlowe Capital, called the rise to $100 "a faithful remake".
"The casting has changed, the location has moved slightly east, and the special effects budget is larger," he said. "But the script is the same one they used in 1979, and that one was already a sequel. Audiences know the ending. Prices go up, ministers find a leaflet, and everyone is surprised on cue."
Diesel has climbed faster than petrol, as the Times notes, which means the lorries carrying the coupons to forecourts will cost more than the coupons save. Harrowgate said this had been "fully anticipated", which is what the department also said about the Suez Canal in 1956.
"We are not repeating history. We are recycling it, which is a different and much greener thing." — Piers Harrowgate, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero
On the forecourt
Drivers in Luton, where I last stood under a price board that had lost the plot, received the news with the weary shrug that is now the county's only export. Doreen Cavell, who manages a forecourt off the A6, was handed a box of coupon books on Monday morning and a single sheet of instructions.
"The instructions are also from 1973," she told me. "They say to tear along the perforation and post the stubs to an office in Croydon. The office in Croydon is a Nando's."
She has taped a hand-lettered sign to the kiosk asking customers not to present coupons for leaded four-star, which the books still list. Three people had tried by lunchtime. One of them was, by his own account, twenty-six years old.
Sky News is running a tracker on what the price does to your tank. It is a fine tracker. It would have been a fine tracker in 1990, too, and in 2008, and on every other occasion this exact number has arrived, looked around, and announced it was new.
The closing credits
Opposition parties have called the coupons a gimmick. The department has called them a bridge. My father, who kept his own unused 1973 book in a kitchen drawer until he died, would have called them a receipt.
He never got to spend his. He would have enjoyed knowing that his son, half a century on, is standing on a forecourt in Bedfordshire watching a woman explain a perforation to a man who has never seen a cheque.
The war will end, or it will not. The price will fall, or it will find a new reason to stay. And somewhere a junior civil servant is already labelling a fresh box of coupons for the crisis after this one, because the last lot were so handy. She has not written an expiry date on it either.
