All of Rishi Sunak’s greatness comes at a price, explained... Rishi Sunak

Few, perhaps non-existent, are the politicians who aren’t at least partially driven by a certain amount of self-regard – but none quite like the current chancellor

Not quite the call coming from inside the house but the flash from inside the car.

As Rishi Sunak drove the extremely short distance from Downing Street to the Palace of Westminster, from behind the darkened windows of the ministerial Jag a bright oblong of light could clearly be seen, suckered against the back window.

A film lighting rig, clearly, and clear evidence that the need for tax rises and spending cuts that were about to be outlined do not yet extend to the chancellor’s own soaring personal vanity budget.

Such was the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Rishi’s six-minute-long Covid Through The Eyes of Me biopic, released on Monday, already he is working on a sequel.

Few, perhaps non-existent, are the politicians who aren’t at least partially driven by a certain amount of self-regard but most, until now, have been content to make do with the colossal attention lavished upon them by the cameras and microphones of the traditional news media without hiring in their own at significant public expense.

But then, Rishi Sunak does not appear to be most politicians. He posed alone, this time, on the pavement steps outside 11 Downing Street. Last year, barely weeks into the job, he made the colossal error of inviting his backbench team out onto the street with him for the traditional photo op. As he is, at 5ft 6in, very nearly an entire foot shorter than his deputy, Jesse Norman, it rather made Mr Sunak look not like the second most powerful man in the country but a very excited little boy on a school trip.

The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy (whatever happened to him?) pioneered a neat trick, in which all five feet and four inches would wait for arriving world leaders on the second step of the Elysees Palace entrance, which Sunak appears to have taken to dramatic extremes.

This time the traditional team photograph was taken on the spiral stairs of 11 Downing Street, with Sunak at the very top and Mr Norman an entire storey below, making the two men appear roughly the same size.

It’s not the only lesson he’s learnt, the hard, slow way. The world is a rather different place from this time last year. Last year, he addressed a packed House of Commons, packed despite a government minister, Nadine Dorries, testing positive for Covid-19 the night before.

In his last Budget, the chancellor set aside a whopping £12bn to deal with the fallout from this thing called coronavirus. It did not prove to be sufficient. But everything’s much better now. So much better that the furlough scheme will be extended til September.

Unemployment rates are also no longer forecast to be 11.9 per cent but a mere 6.5 per cent. The reasons for this were never fully explained, but the fact that, we are now a few weeks short of the point at which the government can have been directly paying your wages for an entire year, in a job that your employer’s quietly made clear won’t exist the moment the furlough scheme’s wound up, probably helps.

But all of Rishi’s greatness comes at a price, Rishi explained. So great has the furlough scheme been that more Rishi greatness will be required to pay for it. This will be, mainly, in the form of a corporation tax rise in 2023.

An especially great idea, this one, as Keir Starmer fought valiantly to find some way to oppose it, despite gladly serving for a full four and half years in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, fighting not one but two general elections with manifestos to raise it even higher than Mr Sunak had suggested.

The Treasury is going to move one of its offices to Darlington, there are going to be freeports, one of which will be in Teesside, allowing it to reinvent itself as an “industrial powerhouse”. All this, apparently, made possible through having liberated ourselves from the shackles of the European Union, as long as you don’t worry about the fact that we had seven of them between 1984 and 2012.

All Starmer could really manage in response was to say that, “One day, these restrictions will end, one day we’ll all be able to take our masks off and so will the chancellor, and then you’ll see who he really is.” The day in question is an unspecified number of years ahead. What will they see, exactly? The danger is that, in this context, the mask “slipping” can only mean tax cuts, and such things tend not to fare too badly with voters.

On this evidence, if Mr Starmer has any sense, the face underneath his mask should be one of blind panic. Having built an electoral coalition out of what once were Labour’s Lego blocks, Johnson and co seem determined not to let any of it go back into the toy box.

It might be little more than a trick with mirrors, the “levelling up agenda” amounting to not much more than whacking the little guy at the top of a flight of stairs and hoping no one notices. But what if they do?