OK, so I may not be burdened with a maths O-level – though I bet my 1977 D grade would be the equivalent of an A* today – but even I can do the basic calculations on this one. Rachel Reeves’ “squeeze the rich till they suffocate” budget plan is an out and out stinker – and doomed not only to ignominious failure but to subjecting people who’ve worked like the blazes to make ends meet all their lives to hellish worry and punitive suffering.

I’m 63 and along the way I’ve made friends with plenty of folk who’ve eked out a meagre living near the breadline and a fair few who have made, inherited or accumulated a hefty packet. My most impoverished pals are struggling with stratospherically rising food prices and the thought of keeping the cold at bay this winter.

Meanwhile, my richest are, well… nowhere to be seen. I seek them here. I seek them there. They’ve upped and offed and gone somewhere out of HMRC’s reach.

Some scarpered the moment Keir Starmer trousered the keys to No.10, but some flew off as soon as rumours and rumbles about the Chancellor’s fondness for the loathsome “mansion tax” hit their radars.

They bought their properties 40-plus years ago, laboriously coughing up a quarter of a century’s worth of mortgage payments out of earned and highly-taxed income.

Like me, they somehow managed to cling on to their homes when Black Wednesday hit in 1992 and mortgage rates climbed to an asphyxiating 14%. Unlike me, they no longer trot into an office (or in my case studio) daily to do a nine-to-five. They have options.

Money can’t buy love or happiness, but it can buy choice. They don’t have to sit tight and pay a strangulating annual tax just to carry on living in their own homes.

Rachel Reeves doesn’t seem to realise that every time she trumpets her desire to get the rich in a fiscal stronghold a brace of wealthy couples boards a plane and gets the hell out of here. Who does that leave to bear the burden of paying this swingeing tax – those who don’t have the means to escape it.

Genuine mansion-dwellers won’t fork out. People who stretched and scrimped to buy their homes years ago, don’t have huge incomes or flexibility and are stuck in the UK because they can’t afford to get out will be the ones picking up the tab.

For Heaven’s sake Rachel, get real. Your “mansion tax” will be paid by people who live in three-bedroom semis in London suburbs.

By all that’s holy, have a re-think.