Westminster has a habit of staging occasions that are at once both lacklustre and ridiculous, and last Tuesday saw yet another one. Rachel Reeves’s speech, we were told, was an act of “pitch-rolling”, performed because – in the words of Treasury sources – the chancellor and her colleagues were “desperate” to get her message across to the public. Here, unfortunately, was the essence of the event’s absurdity: as if to confirm people’s most cynical views of politics, she served notice that she is about to do something hugely significant, but refused to explicitly say what it is.

But thanks to nods, winks and the usual anonymous briefings, what she was signalling was obvious: she could no longer honour her party’s manifesto pledge not to raise national insurance, VAT or income tax – and that, in a gambit last tried by a chancellor in 1975, the basic rate of the last is likely to go up.

If that happens, it will be a massively dangerous moment. Whatever sweeteners are offered and however much ministers might point to additional measures that will hit higher earners, one of the few memorable promises made at the last election will have been broken. The move, moreover, will confirm something that I see and hear whenever I go out reporting: the fact that millions of people resent the feeling of paying more and more for less and less. The public’s already woeful levels of trust in traditional politics will probably reach a new low, with potentially seismic consequences – and not just for Reeves and her party.

The essential point was made a few days before Reeves’s speech by Luke Tryl, the UK director of the thinktank and........

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