Say what you like about the Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, and many do.
Being Leader of the Opposition is one of the most thankless jobs there is.
But today, writing for The Mail on Sunday, she has landed a shrewd and painful blow on the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.
She says that his government has lost the moral authority to raise new taxes on family homes. And she is absolutely right.
If he now dares to try to fill the chasm caused by his own overspending by grabbing at the savings of the striving classes, he will be insulting the country.
Even his own deputy reckoned such taxes were high enough already, when she was faced with having to pay them.
As soon as this newspaper first disclosed Angela Rayner’s property manoeuvres a fortnight ago, the truth about this episode should have been available to Downing Street.
Mrs Rayner, Deputy Premier and Housing Minister, must have known what she had done.
Kemi Badenoch says that Keir Starmer’s government has lost the moral authority to raise new taxes on family homes. And she is absolutely right
Sir Keir, as her boss, was in a position to ask her and she was obliged to tell him. Yet there was an immediate shortage of candour.
Look how long it took this dysfunctional, mumbling government to admit the simple key facts, and how long it took for Mrs Rayner, and Sir Keir, to accept that she had made her position intolerable.
By itself, this was no more than personal carelessness on the part of a senior minister, who ought to have known better.
It also showed reluctance to act by an inadequate government which has stumbled with amazing speed into a sort of permanent slow motion nervous breakdown.
But, viewed in the wider lens of politics, it is an act of astounding hypocrisy, verging on an insult.
The reason for the enormous and grasping raid on homeowners which Labour still seem to be planning is quite simple. They lack the courage, the determination and the leadership to get a grip on a grotesque, unfair and swollen benefits system.
They have been frightened off doing so by a short-sighted revolt by their own backbenchers, who cannot see that such a system will eventually blow up in their faces, causing an economic crisis which will devastate the entire welfare state.
Those who aspire to lead must sometimes take on the hard task of explaining awkward truths to their followers. If they will not do so, then they are unfit for their well-paid positions.
Anyone who wants there to be a proper safety net for those truly in need has to recognise that benefits must be sternly limited to those who most require them.
The Labour Party of Clement Attlee, which Sir Keir’s followers claim to admire, understood this very well.
But the modern Left, typified in so many ways by Angela Rayner, sees people with savings as targets.
The Prime Minister, with less fervour but equal dogma, plainly feels the same way.
In one of his few frank moments during the last election, he explained that when he used the term ‘working people’, he meant those who do not have significant savings or assets.
But how many noticed that his noisy pledge not to raise taxes on ‘working people’ did not in fact cover millions who have worked very hard, and continue to do so?
He has no right to rob them to rescue himself from a mess of his own making.
