“Mark my words, Labour will raise your taxes. It’s in their DNA”. So said Rishi Sunak in the most infamous of all televised pre-election debates last year. And he got that message out despite the outrageous attempts of ITV’s debate host to shut him down. But millions of voters didn’t want to know. They didn’t want to listen. They chose instead to believe the guy opposite, Sir Keir Starmer, who promised to do no such thing. Starmer promised not to raise taxes on “working people”, then promptly did so at the first opportunity. He promised only to target private schools, non-doms and big oil companies, then slammed pensioners, businesses and farmers. And most of all he promised not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT. Sunak is talking garbage, he told us. Repeatedly.

But Sunak was 100% right. And he is now owed a massive apology from not just the Prime Minister but his Chancellor, whose grubby self-serving speech this morning paved the way for the very tax rises that Sunak told us she’d inflict on us, but which she and her boss denied time after time after time.

And she has the nerve, the gall and the sheer shamelessness to blame everything and everyone but herself. It’s not about my catastrophic choices since I came to power, she assured us. It’s not about my appalling tax-raising, debt-hiking first budget.

Oh no. It’s not about the splurge on pay increases for striking public-sector workers or the net-zero fantasy that Red Ed Miliband continues to pursue. It’s not about all those wealthy, successful entrepreneurs who have scarpered from Britain’s shores because I’ve made it clear I want to squeeze them till the pips squeak.

It’s not about the fact that Britain pays more on welfare than it does on education and defence combined. No, it’s everyone else’s fault. Trump, Putin, Truss, Boris. You name it. And most of all Farage. It’s everyone’s fault but my own.

And then, get this, Reeves actually said that she’d always put “country before party”. It’s a good job I wasn’t eating cornflakes this morning, or I’d have choked myself to death.

How dare she. There is now zero doubt that Labour is about to break its manifesto commitments on tax. Just like Sunak said they would. Reeves, as I suspect she knew all along, is about to raise our taxes, thereby inflicting another hammer blow on our snail-like growth and our wretched economic prospects. She will do the very reverse of what this country so desperately needs.

What on earth does she think she’s doing? Does she think the voters are too stupid to notice? Does she really think we’re that gullible that we’ll all forget the countless times she promised she’d never do it? Does she somehow believe that people will respect her more for taking what she self-servingly, deceitfully calls “tough decisions”?

No way. This government was already, before today’s ghastly excuse-laden speech, the worst in my lifetime. And there is not a cat-in-hell’s chance that people will forgive Labour for such outrageous deception.

Stand by for this government’s opinion ratings to fall even further. Stand by for Starmer and Reeves to beat their own calamitous disapproval records. Worst of all, stand by for Britain to sink yet further into economic decline.