Desperate Rishi Sunak splashed millions of taxpayers' cash on flashy PR campaigns as the cost of living crisis loomed last year.
The Chancellor stretched the Treasury communications budget to almost £3.4m in 2021-2022 when he was touted as a serious contender to succeed Boris Johnson.
It means Mr Sunak had raised the Treasury's communications budget by 62% in the last two years.
It was £2.1million in 2019-20 and rose to £2.7million in 2020-21.
The increased communications budget came as fuel and food prices began to rise because of a UK-wide lorry driver shortage.
In September, Bank of England economists predicted inflation could rise above 4 percent before the end of 2021.
Yet the Treasury claims the increased budget includes the department's "insight function" which informs the policy team.
Just weeks ago the Chancellor was widely mocked for posing for pictures to promote a temporary fuel duty cut using someone else's car - in a PR campaign gone wrong after his disastrous Spring Statement failed to help struggling Brits.
Mr Sunak was snapped filling up a Kia Rio at a Sainsbury's forecourt but he later admitted that the vehicle had been borrowed from a staff member.
The photo was one of 34 glossy and artfully staged snaps taken by a taxpayer-funded photographer and released on the Treasury Flickr feed.
On Saturday, we revealed theTreasury spent £250,000 of taxpayers’ cash on focus groups in a single year - and more than half of them took place in Tory target seats.
Tulip Siddiq, Shadow Economic Secretary to the Treasury said: “This increasingly out of touch and desperate Chancellor, has decided to spend taxpayers’ money on a personal PR campaign in the middle of the most serious cost-of-living crisis in a generation.
“This comes after he insulted families across the country by dismissing calls to provide support for extortionate energy prices as ‘silly’.
“Rather than wasting money to boost his own media profile, he should bring forward an emergency budget to support working people struggling with the cost-of-living crisis.”
A Treasury spokesman said: "The size of HMT’s communications team has increased slightly to take account of the expanded ways in which we communicate with the public.
"We remain one of the smallest communications teams across Whitehall.
“The Communications team’s budget also includes the cost of our insight function.
"This has significantly expanded over the past couple of years. While the costs sit with Comms, insight is used to inform the Department’s wider policy making and decisions”.
Mr Sunak was touted as a future Prime Minister, but the row over his wife's non-dom status has left those dreams in tatters.
His wife Akshata Murty was paying £30,000-a-year to the UK Government to keep the privilege, which is legal and applies to people who live in Britain but have a permanent home outside the UK.
He faced claims he tried to dodge scrutiny over his family's tax affairs as broadcast media were blocked from a high-profile event in the North in April.
The under-fire Chancellor was accused of hiding from the cameras at Darlington College, as the nom-dom row escalated.
It also emerged that, while advisers denied access to the BBC and other broadcasters, the Chancellor was accompanied by his £60,000-a-year taxpayer-funded photographer.
The Tory minister denied that he was out of touch with the British public, however, and insisted he understood that many ordinary families were struggling with the high cost of living.
