“If a white person had these views, he would probably be in jail.”

Badenoch fears Reeves won’t reverse the policy “because they want to save face,” and what’s worse, “she’ll come back for more.”

Labor’s figures are wrong, she says, and if serious growth is not expected, businesses will close, the tax base will shrink and taxes will go back up to fill the gap.

“All her bad decisions will impact my life, the lives of all your readers. I don’t want Labor to fail because it will be bad for all of us.”

The reintroduction of the agricultural land exemption from inheritance tax is one of the few entrenched policies that Badenoch has announced so far, along with the abolition of VAT on private school fees.

“When they announced Budget I could see that most of them had never run a business before and had never had to employ anyone,” says Badenoch, who worked as an associate director at private bank Coutts before quitting in 2017 became a member of parliament. .

‘I’ve had to employ people, and I know what National Insurance does to the cost of a job, and it makes you think differently.

“If you look at the Budget, when they announced the (increase in) employers’ national insurance contributions, there was a sharp gasp from the Tory benches. We all asked, “What?”

“And you looked across and the Labor people were all grinning. They grinned because they didn’t understand. They just thought, ‘Yes, greedy businessman, we’re going to take some of the money.’ And I thought, ‘They don’t understand’.”

What they didn’t understand, she says, is that charities, GPs, nurseries, universities, councils, care homes and the like many more employers would be hit by the job tax, and that additional payments for childcare costs, for example, would be “all wiped out” by rising prices.

“I’ve never seen a budget like this where they’ve managed to upset every group you can think of, and the only people who seem to be happy are the unions,” she says.

The budget may have done Badenoch a favour. She admits that in recent years we have “not shown the difference” between Conservative and Labour, meaning that “people think we are, you know, the same. They’re just different faces.” But the government’s ill-conceived budget is already giving Badenoch the opportunity to show where the big differences lie. “Authentic conservatism is coming back, values-based conservatism, not micro-policy or managerialism. We are very, very different,” she says. “And I want people to know that.”

Badenoch itself is certainly different. The fact that it is the Conservatives who have elected the first black leader of a major party (and their fourth woman), while Labor remains married to middle-aged white men from north London, has so irritated some on the left that they are expressing their anger cannot control. .

Dawn Butler, the Labor MP for Brent East, shared a tweet saying that Badenoch “thewhite supremacy in blackface”.

“If a white person held these views,” Badenoch says, “they would probably be in jail, or receiving calls from the police in a way that other people have for tweets.

“I also think it comes from a place of jealousy, that we were able to do something that they and the so-called progressive party were never able to do.”