Next time your boiler is bust, or the toilet won’t flush and you call a plumber to fix it, how will you pay?

If you answered ‘in cash’, you’ve just revealed yourself to be a potential master criminal, the likes of which Interpol might be tasked with tracking down.

Or, it could just be a case of ‘join the club’, because most of us would have said the same and it’s all a bit weird that it’s suddenly a major no-no to admit to having handed over £30 cash in hand, because paying by cheque would have cost another £20.

There’s a Spanish Inquisition going on into the way we pay for things and it’s all down to the fact there’s a General Election in less than 80 days’ time.

Yep, things are getting tense, as the politicians try to outdo each other on the holier-than-thou scale.

On BBC TV’s Question Time programme last week, an audience member asked each of the panel if they had ever paid cash to a tradesman?

Ex-Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond said he’d never handed over a bunch of fivers but admitted that was only because as a politician, he knew it would attract media coverage for all the wrong reasons.

The rest denied ever doing it, except one, who hesitantly admitted to paying her window cleaner in cash, shock, horror.

This theme continued on BBC TV’s Andrew Marr politics show at the weekend, when Labour MP and Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls was at great pains to let everyone know that he always asks for a receipt when he gets his hedge trimmed.

Which just goes to prove how petty the whole thing has become.

Predictably, the ongoing row about tax dodging has swiftly moved on from the way in which multi-millionaires use sophisticated and illegal methods to evade paying tax.

Conveniently, it’s been pinged back like a rubber band onto the rest of us, who might have dared to pay the milkman with a tenner now and then.

Suddenly, doing something as simple as that has made us an accessory to tax-dodgers.

This subject is actually a biggie, because it’s relevant to so many households.

A staggering 80 per cent of us have paid cash in hand to a tradesman to get something around the house fixed, according to research by comparison website confused.com.

More than half believe there’s nothing wrong with paying tradesmen cash in hand and one in six have done it knowing the tradesman is avoiding tax.

This is hardly surprising when you consider that two in five, or 40 per cent, of us have been offered a discount if we pay in cash.

Just one in 10 of us say we’d report a tradesman to HMRC for tax evasion, even if we knew they were actively avoiding paying tax.

But although many of us prefer to turn a blind eye when it comes to certain jobs we need doing around the house, it turns out there is a limit.

Whereas more than half of us think there’s nothing wrong with paying a builder, window cleaner or gardener in cash, only a third would be prepared to cough up the readies for a mechanic when the car needs fixing.

But in the middle of all this self-righteous outrage, some seem to have forgotten that cash is still legal tender.

Not everyone who hands over cash, or asks to be paid in it, is a tax dodger. And anyway, isn’t it about time the spotlight was shifted away from ordinary people trying to make a living and back onto the super-rich who deliberately cheat the system out of hundreds of thousands?