Iain Duncan Smith (IDS) was born in Edinburgh in 1954 the son of a WWII airforce group captain and a ballerina. Aged 14 young master Duncan Smith went to HMS Conway a naval school, after which he did exactly what you’d expect someone with a naval education to do – he joined the army. Maybe he suffered from seasickness. Having attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst he became a Lieutenant in the Scots Guards. During his six years in the army he served in Northern Ireland and Rhodesia.
His military connections didn’t end when he left the army. He went on to work for GEC Marconi and Jane’s Information Group which are both part of the defence industry. In this period he was also educated in Italy and went to the Dunchurch College of Management.
In 1992, after 11 years in the Conservative Party, he was elected as MP for Chingford. Since 1997 he has represented Chingford and Woodford Green. Nine years after becoming an MP he became leader of the Conservative Party. This was an inglorious period in the history of the Tory party and in the life of IDS. He never really settled into the role and almost from the start he had to deal with constant internal opposition, meanwhile the rest of the country barely noticed him. Until, that is, he made his disastrous ‘Quiet Man’ speech at party conference and became the butt of jokes.
It got worse for Iain Duncan Smith. He was questioned on the veracity of his CV. It was pointed out that his attendance at the impressively named Dunchurch College of Management amounted to a few weekend classes at GEC’s staff college. As for his time in Italy, IDS claimed he had a degree from the University of Perugia but it turned out that he had actually attended the Universita per Stranieri which did not give degrees at the time.
If all that wasn’t enough, IDS then had to face one final fatal blow delivered by his own wife – Betsy. Betsy Duncan Smith (BDS) was employed as her husband’s Diary Secretary. Michael Crick, of BBC’s Newsnight, alleged that her pay “was not commensurate with the duties she performed” between September 2001 and December 2002. When asked if BDS earned her money Rikki Radford, Iain Duncan Smith’s constituency agent at the time, said “I know for sure she doesn’t … she’s his wife and she gets on with looking after the kids” (The Telegraph Oct 13 2003). Many others, including 6 Tory MPs, said they had seen no evidence of BDS earning her way.
The House of Commons Standards Committee investigated and although they found that roles in Mr Duncan Smith’s office were vague no rules had been broken. Personally I’ve never done a job where no one knew if I was there or not or if I had done any work or not but let’s give Betsy the benefit of the doubt, she is married to a quiet man after all so perhaps she is a quiet woman, so quiet no one in the office noticed her. Regardless of the findings of the Standards Committee IDS was finished as Tory leader, the Good Ship IDS had foundered on the rocks of Betsygate, and he resigned in 2003 after a vote of no confidence. He went off to lick his wounds.
But IDS wasn’t gone for good. He founded a think tank, as many people do when they’ve just lost a job, the ironically named Centre for Social Justice. He also took the time to write a novel (is there no end to the man’s talents?) of which one critic said “Really, it’s terrible … Terrible, terrible, terrible.”
Giving up a potentially great career as a novelist he concentrated his efforts on social justice. This led to him being made Chair of the Tory’s Social Justice Policy Group in 2005 – the Tories love a good euphemism. IDS had found a way back in and the issue of welfare reform was the key. David Cameron’s ‘victory’ in the 2010 election heralded the return of the quiet man. Who better to tell the Tories about welfare than the privately educated son of a ballerina who went to school on a boat, lied about his degree and paid his wife from the public purse for work she may or may not have done (but probably didn’t)? IDS had gone off into the political wilderness a semi-disgraced former party leader with a relationship to the truth which was questionable at best and he had returned the self-proclaimed world expert on the benefit system, poverty, social justice and everything in between. It was one of the greatest political rebirths of recent times.
Now IDS is the Gruppenfuhrer of the DWP and he has designed the final solution of the benefits issue. This solution has two major parts. IDS has taken the idea of the carrot and stick approach and radically rethought it coming up with the stick and stick approach. The first stick (Workfare, the Work Programme and work capability assessments) is used to bully and punish people for being unemployed or disabled by forcing them to work for free for the likes of Tesco one of Britain’s most profitable companies. The work capability assessments administered by ATOS have been implicated in the suicides of disabled people.
IDS has said he is against a something for nothing attitude and people sitting at home all day with the curtains closed, presumably when his wife was being paid to sit at home all day watching Jeremy Kyle she did it with the curtains open. The curtains, it should be pointed out in a £2 million Tudor farmhouse in Buckinghamshire that he doesn’t pay any rent for because it’s owned by his rich father-in-law the 5th Baron Cottesloe.
Where next for IDS? If politics doesn’t work out for him he could always write another novel – well, perhaps not.
