If you’re lacking proof that too many politicians are a breed apart from ordinary people, look no further than Rachel Reeves’s treatment of pubs. Before we get into her latest mad measure that’s sure to make you spit out your beer in disgust, let’s ask ourselves a question: When was the last time you bought a pint in a boozer and thought “fair enough” when you heard the price? I can tell you mine. It was a pint of Guinness bought on September 21st this very year at the Auld Dubliner pub in Dublin’s Temple Bar. It wasn’t cheap, the beer and a lemonade coming to £11.09 in Euros.

But what I got was friendly, efficient service, beautiful surroundings, live music in the middle of a Sunday, two stools at a table for me and my girlfriend and, crucially, the best pint of Guinness I’d ever tasted (see my joy pictured below). Looking closer to home, by which I mean London, presents a bleaker picture. On Saturday, I went to meet a mate in Soho. It cost over £8 for a pint of middling Guinness. There were no chairs available.

We stood outside dodging raindrops under an awning, only to find ourselves periodically displaced by the swell of smokers joining us under the cover.

By the time I left for home I was freezing, the well-earned beer jacket being no match for the cold indifference of Westminster.

That’s not the picture across all of London, of course. There’s a pub called Connolly’s in Chiswick that does £6.30 pints of Guinness. The Windmill in Acton charges just £5, a price I can remember being horrified at when I moved down here in 2014 but now seems positively philanthropic.

Wetherspoons do a good job at decent pricing but with the expense of a fairly soulless setting.

But most of the time I stand stunned at the price of a pleasure that we humans have enjoyed for millennia, including when I go up north to Manchester, some of whose bars have neglected the city’s indigenous charms, instead copying London’s excesses in some sort of bastardised version of aspiration.

Which brings me to Rachel Reeves, our go-for-growth no-getter. The Chancellor is helping swanky store Harrods, whose flagship is in nauseatingly ostentatious Knightsbridge, in the form of a £1.1million business rates bill drop.

No such relief for pubs, those secular churches of the working classes, as eight close every single sorrowful week.

We’re used to Labour’s working class credentials being exposed as pure pretence and I suspect that there are those among their number who are repulsed by the clientele of some of our scruffier, and therefore best, pubs.

I’d love to charter a plane, drop Reeves into The City pub on Manchester’s Oldham Street and see how that pretence held up.

Then again, it might not be there for long now that she’s snatched away the 40% tax relief for pubs and cack-handedly sought to conceal it with what they sold as a 5p reduction.

A business rate increase which is all the more unwelcome after increases in employers’ National Insurance.

But it’s nonetheless weird that Reeves is not allocating savings to our struggling pubs when you consider that Labour should be figuring out how to win back its wrecked Red Wall which looks to be morphing from Tory to turquoise.

Reform UK is surging in so many polls that it’s become just another boring fact of political life.

Yet Labour risks increasing the price of a pint for the voters it needs by slapping tax after tax on the landlords who sell the stuff.

So I can look forward to even more cartoonish costs in London. Maybe I’ll soon look back in a nostalgia-induced trance at the halcyon days of £8 pints.

It could be that Labour has come to accept its impending electoral doom and its Chancellor is simply ensuring that on the day she and Sir Keir are booted from office they can numb the pain with gobfuls of Prosecco as they rant about the oiks who ended their tawdry careers over a bottle in Knightsbridge.

On that day, just as now, they won’t be troubled by the aforementioned pub closure statistics, which will probably have ballooned to numbers that elicit even more horror from ordinary punters.

Because they, just like so many politicians. are utterly unlike you and the regulars at your local.

The signs have been there for a long time, but it became starkly evident during one slog of statism that readers will recall with no trouble at all: Lockdown.

I wondered miserably at the time how parliamentarians weren’t driven mad by their own authoritarian measures. I certainly was.

But too many don’t treasure pubs, nights out and football. They’ve often spent years sycophantically scrambling up a ladder to the exclusion of many of the pleasures I consider non-negotiable.

These people are so weird, so disconnected that part of their job is convincing people they like the things we do.

The nadir of which was when David Cameron urged people to support West Ham, when he meant the similarly claret-and-blue clad Aston Villa, a team he definitely supports.

So it’s depressingly apposite that Labour aren’t helping our pubs. The party’s higher echelons do not understand the value of this institution.

What’s baffling is that they don’t at least add such a passion to the list of things they’re required to pretend they care about while Reform UK is making such an art of appealing to the very voters Labour needs to survive.