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 Ra

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