Part of the thinking behind Sunak’s fiscal squeeze is that with the economy restored to pre-pandemic health and actually in some danger of overheating, demand could do with a bit of deflating. This is faintly reminiscent of the sort of stop/go fiscal policies we had back in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies and, to be blunt about it, is not good economics. If there is tightening to be done, it is best left to monetary policy.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of pressing down on demand by fiscal means, Putin’s war when combined with the cost of living crisis changes the calculation. The tables are reversed; contractionary forces would seem to have overtaken inflationary ones as the bigger threat.

As it is, the public finances are turning out to be in rather better shape than anticipated by the Office for Budget Responsibility when it last updated the forecasts in October, seemingly giving the Chancellor the fiscal headroom to at least delay the planned National Insurance rise.

For now, he seems determined to resist. If not now, he asks, then when? Delaying only puts off the evil day when some way of paying for the nation’s inexorably growing health and social care costs has to be found. It’s a view I have some sympathy with. If there is cash to splash, it would be better spent on those least capable of coping with today’s cost of living squeeze.

Furthermore, the list of seemingly unavoidable claims on the public purse keeps growing, not least debt servicing costs, now under intense pressure from rising inflation and interest rates, and military spending. The latter will need to rise from the current 2.3pc of GDP to around 3pc just to keep pace in nominal terms with the increases promised by Germany’s Olaf Scholz and maintain Britain’s position as the biggest defence spender in Europe.

The “peace dividend” once proclaimed by George H W Bush and Margaret Thatcher – representing the savings in defence spending brought about the fall of the Soviet Union – has just gone up in smoke. That dividend was taken and applied overwhelmingly to expansion of health and welfare spending; it is hard to impossible to reverse such commitments once made.

Many Tories still look wistfully back to the Thatcherite ideal of a low tax, small state economy, and promise that it can still be delivered. Dream on, for any realistic projection of the future suggests precisely the reverse. Putin’s war makes the return of Big Government Britain almost unavoidable.