Rachel Reeves will deliver her second Budget at 12.30pm today, with what is expected to be a smorgasbord of tax-raising measures aimed at filling a £30bn hole in the public finances. At the heart of the package will be a two-year extension to the freeze in income tax thresholds, says the FT, which could raise roughly £10bn a year. Justice Secretary David Lammy has proposed scrapping jury trials except for the most serious cases or those deemed to be in the public interest, in a bid to slash the backlog in the courts. The majority of cases would be heard by a judge alone, with exceptions for murder, rape and manslaughter. An army of 10,000 robot security guards has been deployed in shops across the country to crack down on shoplifting, says the Daily Star. The Dalek-like bots – which are patrolling crime-ravaged branches of Tesco, Wickes and other big chains – record attempted thefts on video and shout at the thief in an “ominous” Belfast accent, apparently preventing 80% of “intrusions”.

The extravagant delusions of Rachel Reeves

Rachel Reeves has spent the past week trying to sell today’s Budget to the newspapers, says Madeline Grant in The Spectator, which, given her communication abilities, is rather like “asking King Herod to do your babysitting”. Getting her excuses in early – almost as if she, “like everyone else”, knows today will be a catastrophe – Reeves’s big message is that she has been “underestimated all her life”. It’s strange that she hasn’t once paused to wonder why everyone has consistently assessed her as “not up to the job”. And speaking “as a woman”, I can assure Rach most of us do not underestimate her. “We know she’s capable of getting much, much worse.”

There is an exceptionally tedious idea in the chancellor’s head that people challenge her because she is a state-educated woman, not because she is “turning the British economy into a clown car”. A recent “away from the cameras” profile in the FT includes a particularly unedifying scene in which a local business leader in Scotland challenges her “robustly… she believes rudely” over her taxes on North Sea oil and gas. Rather than an answer, he gets a “hectoring on gender politics”, as if “playing at being a Powerpuff girl” were a substitute for economic competence. The piece also contains the intensely funny line: “Reeves demands respect – and she believes that with her Budget, in spite of everything, she will earn it.” There are people in our nation’s mental institutions who believe they are the Queen of Sheba who are less delusional than this. Reeves says she’s “sick and tired” of hearing that people from ordinary backgrounds can’t reach the top. To be fair to her, she’s proving beyond all doubt that “a girl from a Comp can screw the country up just as thoroughly as any Etonian”.

👎🤷‍♂️ One of Reeves’s madder claims is that none of her male predecessors had to put up with such scrutiny or opprobrium, which “simply isn’t true”. Say what you like about George Osborne, he didn’t have a go at the crowd who booed him at the Paralympics in 2012. He stood there and took it like a champ.

Here’s one group of people I don’t feel sorry for on Budget day, says Dominic Lawson in the Daily Mail: the 121 company chiefs who signed an open letter before last year’s election saying Labour was “the best party for business”. What “dupes”. When a newspaper contacted them all last December, just 28 were willing to repeat their endorsement. How low would that figure be today? Some signatories, like Phones 4u founder John Caudwell, say they were blindsided by the rise in employers’ national insurance. But the petrochemicals billionaire Jim Ratcliffe doesn’t even have that excuse – he has moaned about the move to wind down North Sea oil and gas, when that was literally in Labour’s manifesto. Fools, the lot of them.

Americans have long wrestled with the fact that turkey is ungainly, dry and not very nice. Today, says Charles Passy in The Wall Street Journal, chefs from around the world are crafting elaborate thanksgiving dishes to try and improve things. At Hutong in New York there is the Chinese Flaming Turkey, flambéed tableside; Tamarind Tribeca makes a tandoori turkey in a traditional Indian vertical oven (staff joke the bird needs to be taught yoga to fit in the tandoor); Jamaican chain Golden Krust says turkey is so thick it requires massaging in a “turkey spa” to ensure jerk seasonings are properly integrated; and the Chinese chain RedFarm brines the smallest birds it can find for 24 hours and seasons heavily with Peking spices. Yum?

Don’t listen to the anti-lockdown nutters

By far the most predictable response to Baroness Hallett’s Covid report was the lockdown sceptics “coming out in force” to pour scorn on it, says Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. Daniel Hannan boasted in the Telegraph that he had been the only one to “stand in the way of a stampede” when the country was first locked down. Toby Young “dashed” to remind Spectator readers that he, too, had opposed the policy from the get-go, along with other supposed heroes such as Peter Hitchens, Allison Pearson and Julia Hartley-Brewer. To read the likes of the Telegraph or the Mail, you’d think the case against lockdown were a simple matter of common sense. But that’s tosh. “The public always favours precaution, as they did in lockdown.”

One of the right’s favourite comparisons is Sweden, which didn’t impose lockdowns and ended up with fewer deaths per capita than Britain. “Case proven?” Not at all. Sweden is nothing like the UK in social structure, national wealth, health and social care, and much else. Compare their numbers to “socially and economically similar” Norway, which did implement lockdowns, and it’s a different story: Sweden had around 2,759 deaths per million, compared to 1,050 in Norway. What’s frustrating is that there really should be a debate on whether lockdowns and the furlough schemes were worth it for the number of (mostly elderly) lives saved. How many so-called “quality-adjusted life years” were preserved, and at what cost? But it’s so much harder to have that debate when every discussion is dominated by the “deranged” libertarian right, with their insistence that “freedom” trumps the need for even the most basic lifesaving measures.

😷🚑 At the heart of the sceptics’ credo is the idea that the people who try to protect the public are “laughable blobs and plods”. Back in 2006, for example, Boris Johnson described me as “the high-priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness and ‘elf’n’safety fascism’”. Which, in fairness, is a pretty funny description.

The British jewellery stalwart Dinny Hall was seven years old when she realised she had an eye for gems, says Chandler Tregaskes in Tatler. Rooting around at a jumble sale in her local village hall, she bought a brooch with “glistening ruby stones” for just 20p – and it turned out to be a genuine Cartier. Sadly for Dinny, her mum forced her to return the item to the deep-pocketed villager who had included it in the sale by mistake. But “all’s well that ends well” – when Hall launched her eponymous firm 20 years later, that same lady became one of her “biggest early spenders”.

Here’s an indicator that the AI bubble may be about to burst, says Martin Vander Weyer in The Spectator: Silicon Valley super-investor Peter Thiel – co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, and one of the first backers of Facebook – has just dumped his entire $100m stake in chipmaker Nvidia. His fund also sold three-quarters of its stake in Tesla, while beefing up safer bets on Apple and Microsoft. Might smaller investors be wise to follow a man with a $25bn fortune who knows everyone involved in the upper echelons of AI? Thiel also wants to cheat death with cryogenic preservation. If he’s “packing his portfolio into the deep freeze”, I’d say that’s a strong signal to sell.

It’s umbilical cord jewellery, says Hannah Sacks in People magazine, which the rapper Cardi B commissioned after having her fourth child. The birthing bling was made by dehydrating the cord in the shape of a heart before dipping it in gold chrome. It’s the work of the California brand Mommy Made Encapsulation, which has created “umbilical cord keepsakes” and various placenta-based products – pills, prints, and so on – for celebrities including Megan Fox, Vanessa Hudgens and Chrissy Teigen.