On Wednesday, the Chancellor Philip Hammond is expected to use his Budget to help young people get on the property ladder. But should this really be the responsibility of the State? Isn’t there more that the young could do to solve their problems themselves?

Here we present seven simple tips for millennials on how to buy a house.

Be born earlier. All too many young people today didn’t get round to being born until the late 1980s, or even the 1990s. As a result of their tardiness, they were much too late to take advantage of low house prices. Those who had the foresight to be born in the 1950s and 60s, by contrast, have been justly rewarded for their “get-up-and-go”. If you were born too late, be sure not to make the same mistake again. Inherit wealth. Inheriting wealth is an excellent way to pay for that first big deposit. Increasing numbers of young people, however, commit the textbook error of growing up in a poor family. Carry out a detailed assessment of your parents’ income. If it’s less than £250,000 per annum, are you sure they’re the right parents for you? Shop around for the best deal. Ideally, look for parents approaching retirement with no other offspring and a medium-sized buy-to-let portfolio. Make sacrifices. To help you save for a deposit, avoid wasting money on trivial inessentials, such as foreign holidays, new iPhones, nights out, taxis, coffees, takeaways, alcohol, clothing, heating, rent and food. Make your savings work harder. With interest rates low, high street banks are currently delivering little for savers. Instead, try funnelling £20million into an offshore tax haven. Boost your earning power. Struggling financially? Consider making some extra cash on the side by becoming a 1960s rock star, Russian oligarch, chief executive of Walmart or monarch. Club together. If you don’t have enough money to buy a property on your own, think about buying jointly. A two-bed flat in London Zone 4 should be well within your reach if you pool resources with just 60 of your closest friends. Be patient. Remember that property prices can fall as well as rise. At some point in the next 18-24 months, an economic disaster of unimaginable magnitude should bring houses down to a much more affordable level – and, thanks to your youth and superior physical fitness, you’ll be in an excellent position to fight off competitors in the desperate looting of banks, supermarkets and high-street shops. Good luck!

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Tribal warfare

I was relieved to learn that Benedict Allen, the TV presenter and explorer, has been found and is on his way home. When I read that he’d departed alone to Papua New Guinea on a search for an ancient tribe of alleged headhunters, and hadn’t been heard from since, I feared that he’d suffered the most terrible fate. Not death, but the horror that befalls Tony Last, the main character in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust.

At the end of the novel, Tony, like Mr Allen, sets off on an expedition into the jungle – only to be taken captive by an ancient tribe. Instead of killing or torturing him, however, their chief subjects Tony to a far graver punishment. He forces him to spend the rest of his life reading aloud the complete works of Charles Dickens, over and over and over.

“Let us read Little Dorrit again,” the illiterate chief tells Tony, after telling an English rescue party that their missing compatriot has sadly passed away. “There are passages in that book I can never hear without the temptation to weep.”

I hope Mr Allen’s family can persuade him to stay at home in future. Westerners should resist interfering in the lives of ancient tribes. I know this from experience. One morning about 15 years ago, while working at a men’s magazine, I arrived in reception to be confronted by the unexpected sight of an exiled tribal leader from the West Papuan region of Indonesia, in feather head-dress and other regalia. He was refusing to leave the office until the editor gave him a personal apology. A week earlier, the magazine had run a competition to win a trip to our visitor’s homeland, and in his view the tone of the copy perpetuated unfair and inaccurate stereotypes about his people.

I believe he particularly objected to the headline “WIN A CANNIBAL SEX HOLIDAY”.

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Children’s stories

The staff at our three-year-old son’s nursery have given us a report on his progress over the past year. They’ve been particularly impressed by his powers of recall. It seems that he regularly informs them in elaborate detail about his life at home.

For example, he told them about the time that Daddy drove him home through the snow, and had to go extra slowly, because the roads were so icy. He told them about the evening when all the lights in our house, and the street lights outside, suddenly went off, because of a power cut. And he told them all about Mummy’s terrible fear of spiders.

I was interested to read all this, because not a single word of it is true. I have never driven my son home in the snow, or indeed in any other kind of weather, for the simple reason that I don’t drive. Nor, for that matter, does my wife. Furthermore, we have never had a power cut, and my wife isn’t remotely scared of spiders. Yet our son has convinced the nursery that all these things happened. He has also told them about day trips we didn’t actually go on, and chocolate cakes we didn’t actually have.

It’s very odd. For reasons unknown, it would appear that our three-year-old is engaged in a campaign of industrial-scale misinformation.

I fear he may be a Russian bot.