For those of us who are self-employed this week is the deadline for self-assessment tax. In return for the privilege of going without sick pay, holiday pay and maternity or paternity leave we get extra homework during January.

This year the pressure has been lifted. Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nadhim Zahawi has admitted having to pay millions to HMRC but has excused it as simply carelessness. That is such a relief. The next few days will be a lot easier if I use carelessness. He said his errors weren’t deliberate, just like the ones I plan to do tomorrow.

Even the name of the system is wrong.

It should be called self-reporting because you don’t actually make an assessment of yourself.

If it were left down to me I would assess the situation differently. I am not saying I wouldn’t pay tax, I am a responsible citizen and all of us comedians learned from what happened to Jimmy Carr.

I would probably allow more items to be tax deductible.

My current stand-up show includes a lot of material about my baby boy. Surely that means that the cost of raising my son can be written off against my stand-up earnings.

They say it costs £250,000 to raise a child. I should be able to spread that across the next 18 years.

According to some news sites, Mr Zahawi had to pay back tax he owed with a 30 per cent penalty and the total amounts to £4.8million.

That makes it even more annoying when I have to spend a day looking through the downloaded PDF files from my online bank accounts to workout how much interest I earned.

It always comes out around 0.15p. I spend more in electric trying to search for the number.

Obviously there is a difference between tax avoidance, tax evasion and my own system to keep my tax bill low, which is not getting a lot of work since the pandemic. Avoidance is legal and evasion isn’t.

Seeing as Mr Zahawi hasn’t been arrested we know he wasn’t breaking the law. The question is, who makes the laws?

We don’t want a system where the people setting the rules are the ones exploiting them. What incentive is there to close loopholes if you’re going through one at the time?

I am not saying Nadhim Zahawi did this.

He was Chancellor for such a short period of time they wouldn’t have had time to get his business cards printed, but in the week where many of us have to study our tax it’s annoying to see politicians dismiss these issues when it comes to one of their own.