‘Britain was not prepared for Labour austerity and it will do great damage,’ says Sir Vince Cable

She and her ministerial colleagues seem surprised by the torrent of criticism, and some abuse, much of it from Labour-sympathising lobby groups and voters.

All to raise £1.5billion: small change set alongside the size of the fiscal ‘black hole’ So, what went wrong?

The timing was awful.

Maybe the Treasury hadn’t realised that a few days after the announcement, there would be a separate announcement from another bit of government that the energy ‘price cap’ would increase by 10 per cent to a level double that before the Ukraine war caused international gas prices to explode.

A more obvious failure of timing was to present the announcement in isolation from the other painful measures being lined up for the autumn budget.

The WFP cut looks less awful compared to the continuation of the two-child benefit cap which has been responsible for pushing large numbers of families into severe poverty.

Pensioners have been shielded from the austerity of the post-financial crisis era by the ‘triple lock’ but children in poor families have not.

Another failure was to understand the importance of ‘how’. There is always a fuss when universal benefits are restricted.

Some of us remember the cries of anguish when George Osborne means-tested Child Benefit.

But in this case, there would have been barely a ripple of protest had the WFP been made a taxable benefit. Financially comfortable pensioners would have paid back 40 per cent and would have hardly noticed the difference. But the Treasury wanted 100 per cent.

As a result, the pain has been felt most by those just above the meagre threshold of Pension Credit (just over £10,000 pa for a single person). And we know that one in three entitled to claim Pension Credit don’t claim in any event, usually because of the complexities of form filling.

Steve Webb, who was the architect of the ‘triple lock’ which has kept millions of pensioners out of poverty in a period of hardship, has pointed out that the barriers to claiming the benefit would be greatly reduced if other means-tested benefits, as with council tax, were automatically linked. But Treasury officials tend not to think of such practical details.

It will be tempting for the Chancellor and her colleagues to write this off as an unfortunate mistake made in the early days of an unfamiliar government.

I have been there. But there is a more serious problem which will do much greater damage.

The country has not been prepared for Labour austerity.

Labour followed the so-called Ming vase strategy, slipping quietly and carefully into government without dropping the precious vase: power.

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Power might not have been secured so easily had Labour spelt out the obvious truth that we shall all have to pay quite a bit more tax - and rightly so. And older, asset-rich voters will have to pay a lot more.

Honesty also demanded recognition that public sector ‘austerity’ was not some sadistic invention of the Coalition but an inevitable consequence of unsustainable external deficits and debt - which alarm the bond market vigilantes.

Telling the public, just after an election, that ‘things will get worse before they get better’ invites the obvious riposte: “Really?”

The Chancellor must regret not sticking with her colleague, Wes Streeting’s suggested -but discarded – slogan: “No hope is better than false hope.”