Theresa May’s new drink tax is theft dressed up as concern

Was the Home Secretary Theresa May half-cut when she started ranting about alcohol in the House of Commons last week? The haste and suddenness of her intervention had the whiff of addled self-disgust about it, the self-pitying fervour of the alcoholic who is determined to get clean. As if she had been bingeing all morning on 36p tins of White Lightning, or something, and then felt overcome with regret and decided that henceforth no one should be able to afford the stuff, because it is an abomination, a poison despatched from the devil.

The obvious answer, I suppose, is no — she was perfectly sober. There were no immediate signs that she had soiled herself, or whispered reports that she had nutted an opponent in the lobby and been carted off by the Old Bill, or had simply collapsed in front of the Speaker’s chair, insisting to those who might help her that they were her best friend, my besht bloody friend in the world, I promish I’ll make you a minister etc, etc.

The suspicion is that, rather than being drunk out of her brainbox and unable to stand on her kitten heels, she was very soberly attempting to distract attention from the government’s latest wheeze — to squeeze pensioners until their pacemakers give up the ghost. The so-called granny tax, whereupon the government mugs grey-haired old ladies sitting hunched and starving in front of their two-bar electric fires and hands the money directly to advertising account executives earning more than £150,000 a year had played, astonishingly you might think, badly with the press and the public.