Everyone who has ever crossed paths with the VAT man has a tale of woe to tell and Vince Cable now joins a large group of the chastened.

My brush with them came more than twenty years ago when, after a mildly successful patch as a freelancer, I thought I’d better register as I’d exceeded their turnover threshold. My slightly dozy accountant and I submitted the figures – offering to do my bit to fill Her Majesty’s coffers. My thanks was a nasty letter telling me I’d gone over the threshold two years before during a single financial quarter and I had to go back to all the publications I’d written for in the interim and demand they cough up the VAT. Otherwise I’d be put in the stocks. My customers were all thrilled about that, I can tell you. And I received a fine.

My relationship with the Customs and Excise took a further interesting turn when I received my first home visit to have a look at my books. Two guys appeared at the promised time on the doorstep which I interpreted as them arriving mob-handed. But it was subtler than that.

About an hour into the visit, while I was poring over my sales ledger with a desk covered in receipts, the older of the two VAT men quietly told me the young guy was his manager and was in tow because he was on his final warning for poor performance. They wanted him fired for failing to squeeze enough balls until the owners coughed up. Being a touch disorganised when it came to bank statements and bookkeeping I was proving a nightmare case. I felt sorry for the poor guy and did my best to make him look good.

HMRC was the product of a merger between the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise which took place in 2005 and brought together two very different cultures. Customs people often saw themselves as a branch of law enforcement with a proud history stretching back hundreds of years to when they chased rum smugglers around the Dover cliffs. They still do a fair bit of kicking down doors and feeling collars which I’m sure they hugely enjoy.

They pride themselves on a thorough-going approach as I discovered when I once spent a day with them on the Customs front line at Stansted airport. Their pride and joy was a transparent plastic lavatory on a dais on which suspected ‘stuffers’ were made to sit until they evacuated their bowel with their condoms filled with cocaine or heroin.

No such instrument of Number Two torture for the Revenue. In my limited dealings with them I’ve always found revenue folk extremely polite and helpful. My tax office is in the North East and they couldn’t be more accommodating. I daresay if the saintly Cable had fallen foul of them it would have been little more venomous than a “Now what’s gone wrong here then, pet?”