Hunt’s non-dom tax ploy is straight out of the George Osborne playbook

Will the current chancellor’s cunning plan spook Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, just as his predecessor spooked Gordon Brown in 2007, asks John Rentoul

Hunt’s plan to restrict the tax advantages of non-dom status has destabilised Labour (PA)

It is still legal to shoot foxes, provided it is done humanely for pest control, and so Jeremy Hunt is set to shoot Labour’s fox by abolishing non-dom status in next week’s Budget.

This Conservative ploy to scupper Labour has echoes of a similar cunning plan executed by George Osborne, which helped to wreck Gordon Brown’s reputation as prime minister. Brown had just moved into No 10 and was gearing up to call an election to cash in on his “Not flash, just Gordon” honeymoon bounce.

Osborne as shadow chancellor used his speech at Tory conference to propose slashing inheritance tax, a superficially popular policy that shifted the opinion polls and spooked the new prime minister. Brown never fully recovered from “bottling” that election.