Dyson with death
Budget reaction , Issue 1636 WHO better to weigh in on Rachel Reeves’s "spiteful" budget, his views splashed across the Times front page, than vacuum cleaner maker James Dyson?

In her inheritance tax-raising budget, claims the man who became a tax exile soon after campaigning for Brexit but has now returned, the chancellor is "killing off established family businesses, and any incentive to start new ones, with her 20 percent Family Death Tax". (Ah yes, all those budding entrepreneurs fretting about a 20 percent tax on whatever they leave above £1m decades later and deciding not to bother...)

Sucking up land
There was no space, alas, to mention the extensive agricultural and business interests that Dyson (77) might want to pass on to his three children.

His Weybourne group owns 35,000 acres of farmland, which at present rates could be worth getting on for half a billion pounds – all but £1m of which would now be in the inheritance tax net.

Similar changes to business property inheritance tax, bringing in his eponymous vacuum business – which remains headquartered in Singapore – could eventually cost billions.

Flit of pique
When it comes to spite, Dyson could pass on a bit in the way of experience. In the past couple of years he has lost a libel claim against the Mirror for daring to suggest he had screwed Britain with his post-Brexit flit. His company, meanwhile, dropped a case against Channel 4 over revelations of appalling conditions including $10-a-day wages at a Malaysian supplier to Dyson.

Not for them the "aspiration" at which Dyson says Reeves is taking an "ignorant swipe".