As Somali pirates hijacking giant cargo vessels and tankers from tiny motorised skiffs wreaked havoc across the region from the mid-2000s to the early 2010s, a tiny group of UK military reservists in a bungalow in the gardens of the British diplomatic mission in Dubai found themselves fielding daily calls from panicked merchant ships.

Across Southeast Asia, a region heavily dependent on energy exports brought via the Strait of Hormuz, lives are being upended by higher oil and gas prices.

Not a single molecule of Iranian gas is exported to the UK, so the speed of these shockwaves are astonishing, for someone who has been covering efforts to control inflation for over a quarter of a cen...