When I found out that I had blood cancer three years ago, my first thought was how I could best provide for my family should the grim reaper call.

Overhanging everything was the ogre of inheritance tax (IHT), the most monstrous of all levies which punishes Britons after a lifetime of toil and prudence.

The prospect of handing over 40 per cent of my lifetime savings to HMRC, to reward feckless citizens living off state benefits, was enough to make my blood curdle.

At a time when my focus should have been on getting well again, my six months of intense chemotherapy were dominated by the unexpected administrative burden of estate planning.

Thankfully, the cancer is now in retreat. But coming face to face with the realities of IHT left a terrible taste.

It is one reason that I could not be more pleased to hear that Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is considering the abolition of Britain’s most hated tax, and is thinking of announcing this at the Conservative Party conference next month.

It is a singularly brave move – a nuclear option. But one can only imagine the delirious joy such an announcement could bring to millions of households across Britain.

In 2007, when then Shadow Chancellor George Osborne proposed lifting the threshold at which people start to pay IHT to £1million, the cheers almost took the roof off the Tory conference hall.

Gordon Brown, who was at the time enjoying a honeymoon in the polls after taking over from Tony Blair as Prime Minister in June, was so discombobulated by the announcement that it was one of the factors in his decision not to call a snap election and win a personal mandate for his policies.

Inheritance tax is hated for a reason. It is a form of double taxation – because it is by and large a levy on savings made from income that has already been taxed. That is why it seems so unfair.

It is also a tax on your family aspirations, hitting not only your children but your grandchildren.

And however much you strive and save to fulfil those ambitions for your family –and, currently, post-war baby boomers and subsequent generations are scheduled to pass on as much as £7trillion to Generation X (those born between 1965 and 1980) and millennials – Left-wing politicians regard such savings as a pot of gold to be syphoned off for an ever-growing, sclerotic state sector.

As if this were not painful enough, the former Chancellor Rachel Reeves left behind a time bomb for citizens saving for retirement through pensions contributions.

From next spring, in an outrageously confiscatory act, Labour insists that unspent pension pots will be included in the value of estates for inheritance taxes.

The move will punish spouses and descendants at the most vulnerable time in their lives and has dealt a fatal and confusing blow to the savings culture.

Imagine, instead, if all this money gobbled up by IHT were allowed to cascade down the generations to be invested in new housing, Britain’s vibrant tech, AI, creative and pharmaceutical industries.

It could usher in a new age of higher growth and living standards, encourage people to spend and revive the high streets which politicians have helped destroy through more and more ill-designed taxes.

When George Osborne made his intervention in 2006-07, IHT raised a relatively modest £3.4billion for the Exchequer. It is projected to bring in some £9 billion this year.

Funds which will be diverted from new investment and prosperity into the £400 billion and rising black hole of social protection and welfare.

Badenoch has vowed that all her budgetary changes will be fully costed and has pledged to fund an increase in the defence budget by delivering cuts in the bloated welfare budget.

Scrapping IHT may initially look daunting in terms of costs but if the resources could be found by shrinking the size of the public sector, where the numbers employed and their salaries have surged since Labour took office in July 2024, a new age of enterprise could be unleashed.

Just look north to our Nordic neighbours. The Left often glorifies Sweden’s social market, with its generous health and welfare systems, as the model to which we should aspire. This analysis is totally outdated, however.

Successive Swedish governments have tilted towards a free-market model and parliament there voted unanimously to abolish inheritance taxes in 2004.

It is among the factors which unleashed a new era of entrepreneurship in Sweden. It includes a rising number of tech startups and world-leading companies such as the digital music producer Spotify and ‘Buy now, pay later’ champion Klarna, one of the fastest-growing financial technology outfits.

This Labour Party can’t understand that savings should be encouraged precisely because they can be used to promote the economic growth they long for.

As someone who had struggled for many years to pay off a large mortgage on a family home and meet the cost of three children and their education, it was only in my latter years that I had been able to save out of after-tax income.

The near certainty that my estate, consisting of a home in a leafy London suburb and savings (largely invested in UK equities) would be mutilated by 40 per cent tax charge appalled me.

The outrage was increased by a recognition that the very Labour politicians who advocate sapping taxes on wealth are those most likely to be taking entirely legal avoidance measures – as we learned from the disclosures of Angela Rayner’s property dealings.

As the former Tory Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, himself a business creator, told me in the run-up to the 2024 election, inheritance tax is ‘an abomination’ and, when the time was right, he would seek its abolition.

The complexity of Britain’s IHT rules, as I personally learned, is beyond the scope of most ordinary mortals and almost certainly some of the armies of HMRC inspectors required to enforce them.

The Inheritance Tax Act of 1984, the primary legislation, stretched to up to 250-pages alone. Over the past few decades, almost every budget has changed or expanded the rules in an all-out effort to limit avoidance.

Reeves’ efforts to bring land into consideration, to make rich owners pay more, ended up penalising family farms to a national outcry, and has undermined our food security.

Changes such as these, in the small print in every Budget, now mean that the IHT manual, the bible for advisers, consists of thousands of pages of administrative interpretation and practical advice. The reporting form for inheritance runs to 19-pages, while filling in the document requires someone to plough through 100-pages of accompanying notes.

If Badenoch decides to go all-out and abolish – or even soften – IHT, the political boost for the Tories could lift them out of the electoral oblivion from which the party has been suffering.

As it could significantly release the capital for personal and business investment – and catapult Britain out of an era of doom and gloom.