It will be deeds and not words that will define Liz Truss's time as Prime Minister - Sir Andrew Cook

The Queen is unlikely to have commented on the somewhat arcane and unrepresentative manner by which Liz Truss was chosen to lead the country, nor to have dwelt on the fact that it is the prime minister’s own party who got the country into its present mess in the first place.

However, the Monarch will almost certainly have wanted to know how her government proposes to address Britain’s many difficulties.

Starting with the energy crisis. Her Majesty has been on the throne for 70 years. She has a long memory. She may have mentioned Sir Denis Rooke, the first chairman of British Gas, who warned against squandering our plentiful reserves by using them to generate electricity, and asked why this went unheeded.

She might well have drawn attention to the ‘Carthaginian Solution’ Mrs Truss’s predecessor Margaret Thatcher imposed on Britain’s coal miners and suggested it was reckless to abandon this abundant fuel when the Poles, the Chinese and the Indians, among others, still burn millions of tonnes of the stuff to power their homes and factories.

It is almost certain she will have mentioned nuclear power, possibly calling to mind the time in the late 1950s when posters sprang up around the country saying ‘Britain Leads the World in Nuclear Power’ and she herself was opening nuclear power stations as far apart as Dungeness and Dounreay.

She is likely to have asked why the UK has allowed this once world-leading capability to decline almost to extinction, and what the new government proposes to do about it.

Still on the subject of energy, the Monarch might also have sought an explanation to why we closed down our large gas storage field under the North Sea, at the same time disfiguring the countryside with wind turbines which only work when the wind blows.

As Head of the Commonwealth, Her Majesty is known to be sensitive to the vulnerability of its tropical member countries to global warming and the ever more frequent hurricanes this is said to cause.

Even so, she might well have reminded the new prime minister that, being prime minister of Great Britain, not a Caribbean island, her British subjects expect the lights to be kept on…full stop, and have little patience for these silly demonstrations with people glueing themselves to the road and so on.

The Queen is likely to have welcomed any measures to keep down peoples’ fuel bills, but the underlying fact is that we need to generate more electricity and do it with fuels other than gas.

In addition to coal and nuclear, she could have suggested that tidal be re-considered. Britain had tidal schemes for the Severn and Swansea, since abandoned on grounds of cost.

But the cost of not having sufficient affordable electricity is staring the country in the face right now - rampant inflation and turmoil which, unless addressed firmly and effectively, will destroy this government.

It is also possible that the causes of inflation came up during the audience, and with it, well-deserved criticism of the reckless reaction to the pandemic, with profligate money printing and interest-rate slashing.

The new prime minister is not an economist, and she may have needed reminding that to hold its value, ‘fiat money‘ – that is, man-made money - must have a restricted supply and a price, which is the interest rate.

The Johnson government abandoned these iron rules, and Her Majesty’s subjects are now suffering the consequences.

Did she caution her latest prime minister that, if she fails or even looks like failing, even her own supporters will turn against her, saying “Mrs Truss, you’re no Margaret Thatcher."

If time permitted, Her Majesty might have asked difficult questions about the collapsing railways and the disintegrating health service.

Maybe she suggested that sooner or later further regulatory measures are inevitable if train services are to be improved.

Could she also have pointed out that sooner or later the NHS will have to stop treating everyone free of charge if it is to ease the overwhelming pressure, pointing out that if people pay willingly to look after their pets, maybe they should pay something to look after themselves?

The Monarch could have raised many more thorny subjects, such as the refugees she sees on television crossing the channel in rubber boats.

She might have asked why they aren’t processed in the Falklands, for example, which cost such a lot to protect and are looking for a purpose.

She could even have mentioned the Ukraine situation, and asked what you propose to restore some normality to international relations.

Ultimately, whether her Majesty said it or not, it will be her deeds, not her words, which define Mrs Truss’s time in office, and she has no time to lose.

Sir Andrew Cook is a Yorkshire industrialist and chairman of William Cook Holdings.