As the UK battles with a nightmarish cost of living crisis defined by soaring double-digit inflation, climbing energy bills, rent and grocery prices, interest rate hikes and mortgage market chaos, there is one person the public has some to rely on for guidance above any other.
Step forward consumer champion Martin Lewis, a tireless advocate for the up-against-it; dispenser of sage, practical and compassionate advice and a rare constant in public life at a time of “permacrisis” in Britain.
The country may have seen three different prime ministers, four chancellors and two monarchs since the start of July but Lewis is still out there, raging against the government, Ofgem and greedy utility companies, with no domestic issue too small to escape his expert eye.
In fact, Lewis is so popular that he was recently heard from crashing the government website by accident on 25 October, when he encouraged his Twitter followers to use a particular service to calculate the age at which they will receive a state pension.
So many people took him up on his suggestion that the webpage in question was soon utterly inundated with traffic, eventually causing it to suffer a meltdown and become unavailable for a short period of time.
“OK it looks like we’ve crashed the govt site too now... #Oops,” the man himself tweeted as he was alerted to the situation.
A regular on ITV’s Good Morning Britain and a frequent radio guest on the BBC, LBC and beyond, Lewis can currently be found fronting The Martin Lewis Money Show Live, which is broadcast on ITV every Tuesday evening from 8pm and co-presented by Angelica Bell.
The programme is now into its 12th series and celebrating its 10-year anniversary on the air, with Lewis recently thanking the channel “for allowing me to do this – public service consumer journalism – in prime time”.
Teasing the latest episode of the show (Tuesday 22 November), its final airing before Christmas, Lewis tweeted that it would be addressing energy, tax and benefits and feature a guest appearance from an expert on the latter two subjects.
For more on Lewis’s schedule of media appearances, it is worth signing up to his regular newsletter or following his busy Twitter account for the very latest updates.
