This cost-of-living debate, though, is about to get a lot more serious and bad-tempered, going way beyond pressure to move to zero-rated domestic fuel bills.

Away from the Parliamentary theatrics about Downing Street drinks parties, a determined campaign is gathering pace to force Chancellor Rishi Sunak to reverse the tax rises he announced last year, before they are introduced this spring.

Last Thursday, Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, travelled to Bury South – the seat of an MP who had just defected from the Tories – to lay out Labour’s “five-point economic plan”. Her party now has “a totally different mentality” than during the Jeremy Corbyn era, she said, and is now “pro-business”.

It’s easy to scoff – given that Reeves wants to “scrap business rates”, a tax that raises about £30bn a year, while giving little indication how she would fill that enormous fiscal hole.

Labour’s front bench consistently calls for ever higher government spending, with often scant explanation of how such spending would be funded.

Yet, when she claims, as she did in Bury, that “the Conservatives are now the high-tax, low-growth” party, Reeves touched a raw nerve within the Cabinet and among increasing numbers of Tory MPs.

“Now is the wrong time to raise taxes on ordinary working people,” she said last week – a statement that plenty of ministers wish they could hear from Johnson himself.

Earlier this month, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the House of Commons, said publicly that April’s NIC rises and the freezing of tax thresholds should be shelved, arguing that tax rises costing the average family £600 a year cannot be justified at a time of rising inflation and soaring energy bills.