Budget shows compassion is beyond these grasping Conservatives

Along the way he was honest enough to admit that even with the TV lights for ­added warmth, a week on the state ­welfare ­payment for a singleton wasn’t exactly wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. He ran out of his last 50 pence for the meter before his seven days on another planet was up.

(In his more glamorous incarnation as a high profile columnist he did the trick all over again 20 years later.)

Meanwhile a former chief secretary to the Treasury, Michael Portillo, took over a single mum’s family of four for a week and also discovered how tedious it is having to count every penny and shop for whatever is cheapest.

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Sadly, the habit of dipping briefly into real life hasn’t caught on with any ­serving cabinet minister in the current UK ­Government, least of all a multi-millionaire chancellor with a billionaire wife. One pre-Budget pic revealed that his slide – a slip on leisure slipper – cost more than the ­average Universal Credit payment. (Mind you if you’re rich/daft enough you can buy a ­designer pair for a knockdown £1200.)

Mr Sunak’s missus will not feel in any way out of place in modern Britain where, according to Jon Trickett MP, the number of billionaires has risen by almost 500% since the Tories took over the national kitty in 2010.

One of the ways in which many of the very, very rich stay that way is by having very, very sharp accountants. The kind that keep your wealth well away from the ­attentions of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. For a fee considerably more ­modest than paying a fair share of tax, these number crunchers will stash your cash in myriad trusts and offshore havens leaving your taxable income laughably tiny.

As a startling video from The ­Guardian newspaper revealed last week a third of those highly secretive foreign accounts are in British protectorates. Places like the Cayman Islands where one building alone is the registered HQ of 19000 companies. But also where wealthy individuals deposit vast sums.

That ensures two things: we lose their taxes and have less to invest in public ­services back home, and these happy chappies pay very low or no taxes. Win, win for them. Lose, lose for the rest of us.

Jon Trickett, who, as it happens, sits as a Labour MP for a constituency cheek by jowl with Rishi Sunak’s Conservative one, also found that since the Tories came to power, food bank use has increased by over 580%.

How much you know about food bank use and how you view them rather ­depends on your own fiscal status.

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The unlovely Jacob Rees Mogg, whose parliamentary pied a terre is a £5m pad in Mayfair, has his own theories on food bank use.

By his way of it, the increase is because folks didn’t know where they were before. Labour deliberately didn’t tell anybody. Anyway, quoth he, warming to his theme on LBC, it was “rather uplifting” that communities helped out, showing “what a compassionate country we are”.

Yet another old Etonian, he stood down from the hedge fund he helped set up when he reached the dizzy heights of Leader of the House, but not before the fund in question had cannily moved to Dublin to stay in the single market post Brexit. Our Jacob we may hardly bother to note, was one of the noisiest ­Brexiteers, at one point wanting a merger with UKIP. Lovely boy.

THE larger point is that the Rees Moggs, Sunaks and most of Johnson’s cabinet have utterly no concept of what it is like to knock your pan in for a pittance, and then find the richest of men are picking your pocket for a couple of tenners.

The much trumpeted adjustment to the Universal Credit taper, announced by ­Sunak, will help less than half of those on credit, and not begin to look at the sums lost. Neither that tweak nor the rise in the “living wage” will do anything at all for those unable to work.

Dominic Raab, unable to tear ­himself away from his £5k a night Cretan ­holibags, presided at the FCO over a shameful cut in aid to the world’s ­poorest. The tax breaks given this last week to banks are actually worth more than the shrunken aid budget.

Being fabulously wealthy doesn’t ­ensure a lack of empathy to the less ­fortunate, but it helps. It helps when you’ve never been hungry, never been on a tight budget, never calculated whether food or warmth was the more urgent. And never, for the first time in your life, gone into a food bank to put something on the table for your kids at tea time.

Some wealthy citizens, like Marcus Rashford, remember how that all felt, and uses his celebrity and income to do ­something tangible to offset the later good fortune his talents earned him.

However the billionaire class, as a breed, are rather more motivated by ­holding on to what they’ve got. In the USA the ­Democrats have been trying to put a tax on the gains from their liquid assets.

Not only would this bring in many ­billions from fewer than a 1000 people, but it would clean up a tax system which allows the super wealthy to live off those gains, whilst declaring their taxable ­income is a dollar.

Let us remember that we’re talking here about people so fabulously wealthy that they think nothing of burning millions sending rockets into space as this year’s must have virility symbols. (Do check the shape of their spacecraft).

One of them, Elon Musk, was moved to complain volubly about how ­appalling it would be to ask the likes of him to cough up some taxes when he was putting in a super shift counting his money every week.

And a rogue Democrat senator (with friends like Joe Manchin III, who needs enemies?) was heard to complain that the proposal would be divisive. Cue ­hollow laughter from a country where the poor get poorer and the top 1% have more money than they know what to do with. The guys without personalised spaceships that is.

WATCH: Ian Blackford's reaction to UK Government's Autumn Budget

SO here we are after 11 years of “compassionate conservatism” with a Budget which all the institutional interpreters assure us will mean higher prices, higher taxes, higher energy bills, and family shopping supplies well and truly Brexited.

Quite how the Chancellor of the ­Exchequer can contrive to portray all this as a brave new world of post-Covid ­optimism is quite beyond my limited ­powers of imagination. Chanting “high skills, high wage economy” rings pretty hollow to people with no means to upskill and no job.

All the savvy commentators suggest that it’s a stroke of political genius which will allow Sunak to hand out sweeteners in the shape of tax cuts whenever the run up to the next election arrives.

How shoddy and short term is that thinking?

All politicians want to win the next election. Not all of them think it ­morally acceptable to shaft the poor along the way. Not all of them think it morally ­acceptable to keep talking the talk about cracking down on tax avoidance without ever doing a damn think about it.

After all. These are pals. These are chums. These are folks who went to the same schools.

These are the people who will be ­having us round for a nice wee supper with cheaper fizz. But not catered by a food bank.