Official photographs of the Prime Minister distributed by the European Commission to celebrate Surkeir’s surrender deal were captioned ‘Rodney Starmer’.

Rodney is his middle name, but to the best of my knowledge no one has ever called him that, until now. He is proud of the fact that he was named after Keir Hardie, Labour’s first leader in Parliament, and wears it as a badge of honour.

Starmer also takes his full honorific, which broadcasters always run together with his given name as if they are one word. Which is how I came up with Surkeir.

He’s been dubbed Two-Tier Keir, by Elon Musk, and Never Here Keir, because of his fondness for foreign jaunts. Someone has suggested he should be renamed Pierre Starmer after his capitulation to the French and other EU leaders.

But none of this explains why the European Commission should caption his photo ‘Rodney’.

Maybe there’s an Only Fools and Horses fan in the Brussels press office who decided to have a laugh. In which case, don’t be surprised if the next time Rachel From Complaints visits the commission the caption under her mugshot will read ‘Raquel’.

My best guess is that after he caved in to the EU’s every demand, they worked out they were dealing with a complete plonker.

Sir Keir Starmer with President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen at the UK-EU summit at Lancaster House on May 19

On the home front, no one would ever get him mixed up with a member of the Trotter family, although his political promises are about as reliable as Del Boy’s guarantees on hooky gear.

No income tax, no VAT? Quite the opposite in Starmer’s Britain. We’ve got the highest income tax since the Second World War and VAT vindictively extended to private schools.

No taxes on working people? How else would you describe the National Insurance hike, which is already leading to job losses and lower wages. Labour’s taxes are harming the very ‘working people’ it pretends to represent.

The freeze on income tax thresholds for at least the duration of this Parliament is dragging record numbers of employees on modest salaries into the 40 per cent bracket.

Figures from HMRC show the number of people now paying the higher rate increased by 680,000 over the past year and stands at 5.1 million. Five years ago there were just 4.2 million.

Forty per cent kicks in at £50,271. No one earning that kind of salary can be described as ‘rich’ by any stretch of the imagination, especially in the South of England, yet they are being forced to pay a rate of tax originally designed only for the truly wealthy.

Even so, Labour still doesn’t think these hard-pressed folk are being soaked enough, with Deputy PM Ginge Rayner wanting to restrict child benefit and impose eight more tax rises.

I’ll leave the gory details to my colleagues on Money Mail (as a rule, I do words not numbers). But despite the Chancellor’s last disastrous Budget, which raked in an additional £40 billion in tax there’s more pain to come in the autumn as Starmer and Reeves attempt to fill a ‘black hole’ of their own making.

The Lib Dems, no friends of the ‘rich’ themselves, are warning that another two million people will be dragged kicking and screaming into higher rate taxes by the end of this decade. We are facing a £9 billion ‘stealth tax bombshell’, according to the party’s Treasury spokeswoman Daisy Cooper.

Much of this will come from those paying the additional rate of 45 per cent, which starts at £125,140 and is now being paid by 600,000 people and rising, after being cut from £150,000 by the Tories.

On top of this Rayner and far Left Labour backbenchers are demanding a whole new raft of ‘wealth taxes’. Who is to say they won’t get them, particularly if Starmer and Reeves implode? I wouldn’t believe Ginge when she says she has no designs on Downing Street.

Maybe there’s an Only Fools And Horses fan in the Brussels press office who decided to have a laugh by captioning official photographs of the Prime Minister ‘Rodney Starmer’.(Pictured L-R, characters Uncle Albert, Derek 'Del Boy' Trotter and Rodney Trotter)

All this extra revenue is needed to fund Labour’s drunken sailor spending binge, particularly buying off Labour’s union paymasters and hosing down the public sector with extra billions of ‘investment’ without any increase in productivity in return.

The lion’s share will disappear in higher wages. Only yesterday we learned that more than 300 NHS fat cat managers are being paid over £200,000 a year - which could be far better spent cutting waiting lists. The doctors are also coming back for more and threatening strike action, despite being handed increases averaging 22 per cent immediately Labour took office.

Raking in taxes and ‘soaking the rich’ may delight the Treasury and the class warriors on Labour’s backbenches, but it is ruinous for the economy.

Incentives to work harder and invest in new business are stifled. Why seek promotion or put in the overtime if your extra pay is going to be gobbled up in higher rate taxes?

Hammering Middle Britain will backfire and make us all poorer, especially at a time when a staggering nine million people are described as ‘economically inactive’ and we face an astronomical welfare bill because of Britain’s burgeoning sick note culture.

The way things are going, in ‘Rodney’ Starmer’s Britain soon only fools and horses will work.

Those class warriors may be cheering the scrapping of ‘non dom’ status for rich foreigners living here but these are the very people who spend a fortune in this country, sustaining countless jobs in industries such as hospitality.

A record 10,800 high net worth individuals left Britain in 2024, double the previous year. And they weren’t all billionaire hedge funders, merchant bankers and oil sheikhs. Many were self-made British citizens who had invested in their own businesses, creating work for thousands.

Raising taxes drives wealth abroad. This time next year, Rodney, there won’t be any millionaires left here to tax.