These are words I never thought I’d write, but I have a grain of sympathy for Angela Rayner in her current plight.
This is because, like her and so many of the rest of us, I rely entirely on professional financial advisers to guide me through the fiendishly baffling complexities of the tax system, and help me avoid paying the grasping HMRC more than I must.
I just hope and trust that mine know their stuff better than hers – as they certainly should, given the hefty sums they charge me for their expertise. Left to myself, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to arrange my affairs legally, to the best advantage of my family and my own future comfort.
Indeed, I’m every bit as clueless as Ms Rayner appears to be (and that’s really saying something!).
But there my sympathy for her abruptly runs out.
Unlike her, I’m not the Deputy Prime Minister, and I have no say in formulating tax law. Nor am I the minister in charge of housing policy, who really ought to know a thing or two about the rules as they apply to stamp duty.
Another crucial difference between Ms Rayner and me is that I haven’t spent my entire adult life demanding higher taxes on those vaguely defined as ‘the rich’, or heaping abuse on those who try to minimise their bills.
On the contrary, I have always argued that seizing too much money from the people who earn it, and giving it to those who don’t, is a sure-fire recipe for national ruin – which does no favours to anyone, rich or poor.
In that respect, at least, nobody can call me a steaming hypocrite.
As it happens, it was only when I went into semi-retirement, seven years ago, that I began to think seriously about taking tax advice to secure my family’s future, and signed up with the whizzkids at one of the country’s biggest wealth-management firms, St James’s Place.
(Ms Rayner hasn’t said who wrongly advised her that she could legally avoid paying tens of thousands of pounds in stamp duty. Perhaps it was some random bloke she bumped into in a pub.)
Anyway, first the good news: the experts at SJP tell me that, as things stand, Mrs U and I should have enough coming in from my life savings and work pensions, which I’ve left untouched until now, to live fairly comfortably until the end of our days, after I retire fully on my 72nd birthday at the end of November.
This will be particularly true if we press ahead with moving from London and downsizing, as we plan to do next year.
The bad news, announced this week, is that Chancellor Rachel Reeves has decided to delay her second Budget until November 26. That will be just three days before I give up this column for good – and the income that comes with it.
Who knows what horrors she has in mind for me, or how the contents of her red box may throw out my advisers’ painstaking calculations and wreck all my plans – along with those of countless others in my position?
Suffice it to say that businesses are far from alone in viewing the coming long weeks of speculation, anxiety and destabilising uncertainty with huge trepidation. But more of that in a moment.
First, I should perhaps say a word or two about why I’ve decided to stop work altogether.
I’m very conscious that it has been an immense privilege to have had this weekly platform for so many years, free to witter on to readers about whatever subject may have taken my fancy.
I also know that most of my colleagues think I’m daft to give up the column, while a great many ambitious young journalists would give their eye teeth for my cushy and lucrative slot.
But the fact is I’m also aware that my mind is slowing down, while my memory is nothing like what it used to be, in the days when I could name not only every Cabinet Secretary and junior minister in the Government, but all their Parliamentary Private Secretaries, too.
These days, I have to check and double-check which of Labour’s hopeless crew has overall responsibility for such weighty briefs as defence, education or transport.
You can blame half a century of drinking and smoking too much, but I’m increasingly afraid that I’ll make some stupid mistake, that may land me in trouble with the Press regulators.
Worse, I fear I may upset some sensitive flower by cracking an off-colour joke, or expressing an obvious truth about, say, human biology – only to find myself swooped upon, like Father Ted’s creator Graham Linehan, and dragged to a cell by armed police.
No, in these utterly bewildering times, I feel I’m too old to face that sort of nightmare.
So from December onwards, I’ll leave it to braver and more energetic souls to carry the banner for old-fashioned common sense, while I bask in blissful idleness, seven days a week, free at last from all columnar anxieties.
But back to the terrifying speculation about the delayed Budget, now doomed to swirl on for the best part of three months.
Only a year after taking office, Ms Reeves has already managed to convert an alleged £20 billion black hole, which she claimed to have inherited from the Tories, into an all-too-real £50 billion abyss, created by herself.
So how will she try to fill that yawning gap between the state’s expenditure and its income this time round, having already raised taxes by an eye-watering £40 billion only last year?
Well, brain-dead Labour backbenchers have made it crystal clear they won’t stand for any significant cuts in our vastly bloated welfare spending, which would offer the only sensible means of solving the problem without fatally compromising economic growth.
Meanwhile, Ms Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer have repeatedly ruled out any increases in income tax, VAT or National Insurance (though not for employers, as it has turned out).
So it’s beginning to look inevitable that, once again, the Chancellor will focus her greedy eyes on property and other assets. And this is the very moment when Mrs U and I will stop relying on my monthly earnings from work to pay the bills, and start depending entirely on my state and occupational pensions, topped up by any profit we may make on the house when we downsize.
By abolishing the exemption for unspent pension pots, the Chancellor has already multiplied my inheritance tax liabilities by a factor of five (bad luck, our four sons).
Will she now seize up the housing market, as so many pundits predict, by bumping up stamp duty – thus making it even tougher for young families to buy, and oldies like us to sell?
And what about the 25 per cent lump sum we’re now allowed to draw from our pension pots, tax-free, on which many people’s plans for retirement depend? Does she intend to slash the maximum amount we can draw, as some of the speculation suggests?
Whatever the truth, many of us face three months of agonising uncertainty, as our dreams of comfort in old age crumble to dust.
Isn’t it almost enough to make us seek out Ms Rayner’s original tax adviser – and hope that we don’t get caught?
