There are just two weeks to go until Rachel Reeves’ second Budget. Twelve months after telling the CBI that she was ‘not coming back with more borrowing or more taxes’, she is now planning to do, er, exactly that. All sorts of various measures are being tipped and touted in the newspapers. But the most eye-catching is clearly the mooted rise in the basic rate of income tax. No Chancellor has dared hike this since Denis Healey in 1975: a decision which was followed a year later by the infamous IMF bailout. An encouraging precedent…

Reeves is a history lover, who loves to lecture on Harold Wilson and have pictures of past Labour giants on her wall. But while she is likely to repeat Healey’s tax-raising tradition, she is unwilling to join him in having a tipple at the Budget. By convention, only the Chancellor may drink (openly) in the House of Commons when giving his or her annual big speech. George Goschen enjoyed port, Winston Churchill a brandy. Hugh Dalton preferred a rum and milk while William Gladstone – a self-flagellator par excellence – opted instead for sherry and beaten egg.

Yet sadly, ever since Ken Clarke’s final Budget of 1996, no Chancellor has ever enjoyed a drink at the despatch box: presumably on the advice of their omnipresent special advisors. Having enjoyed merely mineral water at her first speech last year, Steerpike has established that Reeves will do the same this year. In doing so, she follows in the footsteps of Messers Brown, Darling, Osborne, Hammond, Javid, Sunak, Zahawi, Kwarteng and Hunt before her: most of whom endured fairly miserable growth rates. Mr S will leave it to his readers to decide whether that is a matter of causation or correlation…

Guess it will just be the rest of us drinking eh?