The self-employed power Britain. Tax them more at your peril, Philip Hammond

Claudio Ranieri will go down in footballing folklore as the individual who accomplished mission impossible by winning modest Leicester City the Premiership title in 2016.

He will also be remembered by many footballing aficionados as Mr Tinkerman, the manager who had a propensity to tinker with teams (especially during his time at Chelsea) when a more laissez faire approach was called for. But like his job at Leicester, Mr Ranieri has now lost his Mr Tinkerman mantle. It has been wrestled from him by Philip Hammond, the meddling Chancellor of the Exchequer.

For the time being, Mr Hammond wears the Tinkerman crown, albeit somewhat embarrassingly rather than vaingloriously. He adorns the crown because, like many Chancellors before him,  Mr Hammond could not help tinkering with the Government’s finances in the Budget. And like Mr Ranieri, it could well lose him his job (of course Mr Ranieri did not lose his Leicester job for too much tinkering but for a run of bad form from his overpaid squad who were content to bask in the glories of last year) .

The Chancellor’s tax assault on the country’s self-employed – through the raising of class four National Insurance Contributions – is spectacularly wrong on so many levels.