Boris Johnson likes a wind-up, so he must have known how Labour would respond to his cut to the duty on sparkling wines. “A Budget for Champagne-sipping bankers on short-haul flights,” cried Labour’s Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves. It must be the first case in fiscal history of a Budget announcement being used to troll the opposition.

Voters are sophisticated consumers and know perfectly well that it is not only wealthy people who drink Prosecco – in fact, the well-off now regard sparkling wines as hideously lower class.

What Johnson was doing was slyly introducing minimum alcohol pricing, linking duty to alcoholic content. Ciders and sparkling wines are generally lower strength.

Mind you, it was still a presentational risk for a scion of privilege like Eton-educated Boris Johnson to positively invite accusations of class bias, not to mention countless jokes on The Now Show and HIGNFY. His civil servants would have called it “courageous”. And this was far from the only provocation from Champagne Boris, whose pudgy fingers were all over this Budget.

Cutting air passenger duty on domestic flights was guaranteed to inflame the anger of green groups on the eve of COP26. Why muddy the net-zero message? Well, don’t assume Johnson actually wants to ingratiate himself with environmental activists. Red-wall voters in the north of England are not particularly enamoured of people who glue their heads to motorways and tell them they shouldn’t go on holiday.

And so it goes on. We know that Boris Johnson is a trickster, a shape-shifter and a risk-taker. Perhaps the greatest risk of all was his giving the finger, metaphorically speaking, to his own party. Many Conservatives, not just those who revered Margaret Thatcher, are appalled by his adoption of tax-and-spend economics.

For a Tory PM to preside over the highest levels of tax since 1950, and the highest sustained level of public spending since the 1970s, is a repudiation of everything Conservatives are supposed to stand for. The Treasury Secretary, Simon Clarke, stoked the flames by admitting that Johnsonism represents a “philosophical shift”.

This shift is real and a delayed result of Britain leaving the European Union five years ago. Brexit has disrupted British politics, in much the same way as social media disrupted the mainstream media. This is not really a conservative party any more. It is a new kind of populist party, led from the front by a charismatic individual. You might even call it the Brexit Party redux.

The most obvious feature of the New Conservatism is Boris Johnson’s colonising Labour territory on public spending.

This is a huge risk when inflation is rising, trade falling and the UK economy suffering an energy crisis on top of a labour shortage. The PM’s “age of optimism” may soon look more like an age of delusion. But Johnson seems to think that his language of national renewal will galvanise the nation. That his unabashed English nationalism can do what Scottish nationalism did for Nicola Sturgeon: shield him from the slings and arrows of economic fortune.

It won’t shield him from his own side. The cries of “shameful betrayal” from Daily Telegraph columnists like Allister Heath are extraordinary for anyone who knows anything about Conservative history. Even relatively liberal Tories, like the former Treasury Secretary Michael Portillo, have condemned Johnson’s new philosophy, saying the Conservatives now have an “identity crisis”. The pro-market Adam Smith Institute just says, ad nauseam, that Boris Johnson is “economically illiterate”.

It is an article of faith in Conservative circles – one to which Boris Johnson has himself long subscribed – that raising taxes does not necessarily increase revenues. Quite the reverse. They usually refer to former chancellor George Osborne’s cut in the 50p additional rate in 2012, which Conservatives say led to an increase in tax revenues from the wealthy.

This is because fewer of them sought to avoid it, or leave for tax havens. (Nicola Sturgeon appears to support this view, which is why she didn’t restore the 50p additional rate in Scotland.) Tories also claim, with some justification, that lower taxes can stimulate economic growth, because businesses keep more of their profits for investment.

So, how could a true blue Tory raise corporation tax from 19 per cent to 25% – reversing what chancellors like Osborne sought to do? Britain’s bosses have been hit successively by employers’ national insurance, a 6.6% increase in the minimum wage, leaping energy prices, supply-chain problems, and Brexit choking off of cheap foreign labour. Businesses recovering from Covid are furious, even Brexiters like Simon Wolfson of Next.

What of Rishi Sunak himself? He is a former investment banker, married to a multimillionaire, and a believer in low taxation. The Chancellor promised Conserative MPs last week that taxes will eventually come down – but few believe him. He has just signed off another £150 billion in extra spending for education, roads, justice etc – but mainly on health. That alone is taking a massive chunk of public spending, more than 40%. Many Tories regard an unreformed NHS as a “black hole”.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies, normally sees through Budget smoke and mirrors, and even it admitted that we are seeing a “highly significant” increase in public spending. This is happening after a spell of extraordinary financial stress: a health crisis that required £300bn in extra borrowing. A more conservative Prime Minister would have said that now was the time to rein in spending, not increase it. They might even have said it was immoral to load this debt burden onto future generations, not to mention this generation. These tax increases, coupled with inflation, will hit many of those who Tories like to call “middle earners”, but are really on the boundary of the higher rate tax and stand to lose £3,000 a year.

Pensioners may not see the funny side of Johnsonomics either. They are to lose the triple lock on pensions; will have to pay national insurance if they work; and will see their savings and fixed incomes squeezed by inflation. This triple whammy may make them think twice about voting Tory.

The SNP and Labour were also trolled by the joker’s Budget. The Scottish Finance Secretary tried to claim that the extra £4.6bn coming from the Barnett formula was actually a “reduction” in Westminster spending. This was disingenuous. Kate Forbes was comparing the spending review with the pandemic year, 2020/21, when Sunak pumped an extra £8bn into the Scottish exchequer to cope with Covid. Her complaint would only make sense if she was expecting a new pandemic every year until 2025.

Champagne aside, Rachel Reeves had the sense to welcome the increase in public spending while warning about inflation and poor growth. Sir Keir Starmer has ruled out increasing income tax and even opposed the increase in corporation tax. Labour can’t go into the next election campaign calling for more spending now that Boris Johnson has maxed out on the public credit card. And adopted the economic policies of one Gordon Brown.