As the Budget approaches, Westminster is full of chatter about Rachel Reeves’s decision to take the ‘smorgasbord’ approach to fiscal policy: lots of small, detailed measures, each raising only modest sums for the Treasury. Conventional wisdom says, correctly, that this is risky. Every little tweak is another opportunity for something to misfire. And when people in SW1 talk about small Budget measures going wrong, they often invoke the same cautionary tale: the pasty tax.

That was the 2012 proposal by the coalition government to impose VAT on hot takeaway food, meaning the price of a Greggs sausage roll or a service station pasty would rise by 20 per cent. The resulting Pastygate saga became a symbol of how quickly a seemingly minor fiscal change can explode into political farce.

So is Rachel Reeves heading for a string of Pastygate-style horrors at her Budget? Quite possibly. But that is also the wrong question, because this government’s pasty problem has already arrived.

This week I found myself in a London station, cold, hungry and in search of something warm. I fancied a pasty. I walked over to the kiosk, glanced at the display, and retreated empty-handed. £7.20 for a pasty. I was hungry – but not that hungry.

Food is painfully expensive at a time when Labour is in office

That £7 pasty is, I suspect, more politically significant than almost anything Reeves will announce next week.........

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