Time was when a chancellor had to resign for leaking the Budget – Hugh Dalton famously lost his job after telling a reporter a few details of what he was about to deliver. Dalton assumed it was past the newspaper’s deadline, but he was wrong. Nowadays, it seems to have become customary for chancellors to leak beforehand, just leaving a ‘rabbit in the hat’ for the day itself. Therefore, we should take seriously reports in the Times this morning that Jeremy Hunt has abandoned plans to cut income tax, inheritance tax or stamp duty next week and instead intends to limit himself to a further one pence reduction in National Insurance Contributions (NICs). A tax on vaping liquids also seems to be on the cards.

Does he think it will be enough to turn around the polls and allow the Tories to win the election? Probably not. It is seems pretty clear that the Conservatives are doomed whatever Hunt announces next week. No tax cut he is likely to deliver will make up for the tax rises he and Rishi Sunak have unleashed on us over the past couple of years. Freezing the tax thresholds at a time of high inflation is bringing far more people into the 40 per cent tax bracket than was intended when Nigel Lawson set that as the upper rate of income tax in 1988.

In 1991/92, 3.5 per cent of taxpayers were in the 40 per cent bracket. By 2022/23 it was 11 per cent and by 2027/28, if the freeze remains in place, the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) expects it to be 14 per cent. Further up the income scale there is more misery, too, with an increasing number of taxpayers being sucked into the twilight zone between £100,000 and £125,000 where the personal tax allowance starts to be withdrawn and taxpayers end up paying an effective marginal rate of 60 percent. Kwasi Kwarteng was going to abolish the 45 percent tax rate; Hunt has instead lowered it to kick in at £125,000.

If Hunt fails to confirm a 1 per cent cut in the basic rate on income tax to 19 per cent he will be going back on a promise made by Sunak in the Spring Statement of two years ago. All this said, Hunt is onto a promising theme by cutting NICs – a further 1 per cent fall would come on top of a 2 per cent cut on employees’ contributions in the Autumn Statement. In opposition, when Gordon Brown was jacking up NICs in the hope that we would notice it less than if he increased income tax, the Conservatives quite reasonably branded it the ‘jobs tax’. Back in the 1970s Labour was derided for placing an higher tax rate on ‘unearned’ incomes. But we now have a tax system which blatantly treats income more harshly if it is earned rather than unearned.

A good ‘rabbit out of the hat’ next week would be not just to announce a one per cent cut in NICs but to announce their phased abolition over the lifetime of the next Parliament. It might still not win the Tories the election but it would throw down a gauntlet for Labour to stick to the abolition of NICs which Hunt had announced. If Labour failed to do this then it would be the Conservatives who were suddenly the party of the workers and Labour who favoured treating the idle rich more favourably. That would not be a comfortable place for Keir Starmer to be.