Last Christmas you can get lumps of coal in your stockings

This is the last year Britons can get lumps of coal in their Christmas stockings.

Sales of the fossil fuel to the public will be banned next April, marking the end of the tradition.

A BBC presenter said Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng most deserve the punishment this year and that it could have ignited Greta Thunberg's burning hatred of fossil fuels.

Radio 5 Live host Nihal Arthanayake, who put his children on "Santa's naughty list" in 2017, said the former PM and her Chancellor's "disaster of their own making was even worse than Kanye West's "shocker of a year".

He said the American hip-hop artist's anti-Semitic outbursts had made him another option for the most deserving of the Victorian punishment. But that Truss and Kwarteng's short-lived stint in government had to make the "low-lights package of 2022" which politically "would come very near the top of anyone's, 'well that escalated quickly'."

The 51-year-old said: "You cannot really look at this year without looking at Quasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss. "What happened in those 44 days is probably worthy of a few lumps of coal in their Christmas stockings. "I think objectively that was a disaster of their own making. It wasn't that other things happened to them, it was objectively I think if you look at the political landscape of 2022, those 44 days were utterly bizarre." He added: "The second shortest run of any Prime Minister in the country, a mini budget that feels, shall we say, misguided. "That was the overall summary of those 44 days, a lot of misguided attempts at doing thing. "So I think if on Christmas day both of them come down and they find lumps of coal in their Christmas stockings from Santa, I don't think that they would feel particularly aggrieved by that like my children, I think they would probably go, 'I think we are going to take this on the chin, and fair play Santa'." The Essex-born broadcaster and author also claimed that Swedish eco-campaigner Greta Thunberg may have been inspired by getting coals at Christmas.

He said: "Maybe that's how she ended up being someone who's become interested in the climate crisis because her parents gave her coal and she was so disgusted at fossil fuels... It's an outlandish theory."

Coal has been mined in the UK since before the Romans and is part of a traditional new years' celebration in Scotland, called First Footing.

The Government is phasing out coal sales for greener synthetic alternatives in April.