The lights in the office of Ofgem’s CEO turned themselves off with impeccable timing – just as he was trying to reassure Brits over the looming gas crisis.

Jonathan Brearley was plunged into darkness while giving evidence to the Commons select committee via a video link earlier.

He had been trying to explain to MPs that the UK has ‘one of the most secure and resilient’ gas and electricity supply networks in the world, amid fears of potential energy shortages over the winter.

But, as the cameras cut back to him to answer a question on energy companies, Mr Brearley briefly had more immediate power supply problems to worry about.

His predicament was not missed by MPs who shouted ‘the lights have gone out’ and ‘don’t panic’, while the CEO excused himself to try to deal with the issue.

Mr Brearley said his temporary outage was in no way connected to the rise in energy costs, but instead an automatic sensor has turned the lights off because he hadn’t been moving about enough.

He admitted the timing was ‘unfortunate’, given the topic up for discussion.

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During his appearance in front of MPs on the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee, Mr Brearley warned ‘well above’ hundreds of thousands of customers may be left in limbo as their energy supplier goes bust in coming months.

Jonathan Brearley declined to give an estimate of the exact number of customers who may be affected.

He said: ‘We do expect a large number of customers to be affected, we’ve already seen hundreds of thousands of customers affected, that may well go well above that.

‘It’s very hard for me to put a figure on it.’

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