IDS: Labour say they're reforming welfare but they're simply cutting it. It won't work

Telegraph

23-05-2025

Iain Duncan Smith is fixing me with a gimlet gaze while he explains his role as backbench MP. It is not at all what I expected. The former Tory party leader (before it ditched him) and former secretary of state for work and pensions (before he ditched it) was re-elected to Chingford and Woodford Green last year (after Labour ditched itself). More of which shortly.
'I am a flea!' he declares improbably. Come again? From Tory big beast to microscopic pest. That's a bit of a leap, isn't it?
'I am proud to be a flea. A good backbencher must do battle in the war of the flea,' he repeats, with, it must be said, all the energy of an unwelcome interloper that can jump 150 times its own length. Although now 71 years of age, Duncan Smith began the morning with a vigorous game of five-a-side football, so it's not quite the stretch it might seem.
'I'm an agitator. I harry and annoy, making ministers itchy and uncomfortable until things get done. I approach them in the lobby, I go and see them and eventually – I hope – they give in. As an MP, you have the opportunity to take on cases and causes for people; you are the person between power and the people.'
So much for marking time on the green benches. The way Duncan Smith tells it, it's where a surprising amount of work gets done: 'You can change legislation, you can amend Bills. Take 'cuckooing', where drug gangs take over the homes of vulnerable people. I campaigned to make it a criminal offence last year and then reminded this Government they voted for it when they were in opposition and now it's happening.'
I have come to see him in his office, fully expecting a glorified cupboard, which is traditionally the lot of the Opposition for whom the days of wine, roses and nice views of the Thames are over. But no. This grand, wood-panelled, deep-carpeted space, large enough to host a cocktail party, is surely the preserve of grandees?
'This office is traditionally for former PMs and ex-party leaders,' he explains. 'I've been here since 2003 and have repeatedly refused to leave because it suits my purposes very well. After this last election the chief whip asked me to move. I told him: 'If it's between the room and the job, I'll take the room.''
He is speaking of the general election, not the more recent local elections when Reform swept the boards. But Duncan Smith refuses to even entertain downcast thoughts: 'We knew what would happen; when we left government we were deeply unpopular. By voting for Reform, voters were rejecting us and Labour. It was a case of 'a plague on both your houses' because the electorate felt neither of the traditional parties was listening to them. We need to remind voters of what we stand for.'
As for Labour's woeful performance less than a year into government, he points to the axing of the winter fuel allowance as a huge blunder. 'Labour made a big mistake on cutting something so totemic; if you attack the old then their children and grandchildren will be alienated. Then again all their benefits cuts are coming across as arbitrary and not thought through.'
Policies come and go, but Duncan Smith seems immovable. I can't help wondering aloud how Betsy, his wife and mother of their four children, feels about him sitting for yet another term. They are, after all, grandparents of two – soon to be three. Does she not dream of the day he walks away from Westminster, gets into gardening and finally takes that retirement cruise down the Danube?
'Absolutely not,' he says. It was just a random example plucked from the air but Duncan Smith is a very literal man. 'The Danube? We would both hate it. I think I'd end up throwing all the other passengers overboard.'
That is an oddly pleasing vignette, even if I can't quite put my finger on why, but we move swiftly on as we are here to discuss his unexpected renaissance. As the likes of Liz Truss, Grant Shapps, Penny Mordaunt and Jacob Rees-Mogg lost their seats last year, Duncan Smith strolled back into Chingford and Woodford Green, thanks to Labour in-fighting. The seat's original candidate was deselected for her pro-Palestinian views but went on to stand as an independent, splitting the Left vote and giving him a 4,757-strong majority.
He first entered Parliament in 1992, when he took over Norman Tebbit's constituency. Having become leader in 2001, he was ousted in 2003 in favour of Michael Howard, partly because of a smear campaign against his wife, who was his diary secretary, which suggested Betsy had not worked the necessary hours to merit her pay.
'It was utterly despicable,' Duncan Smith almost spits out. 'Of course Betsy was cleared of everything but by then it was too late. It was a blow. Did I want to be prime minister? I don't think anyone becomes party leader and not have that ambition but it doesn't matter.'
To assess whether he had the chops to be PM, I subject him to the traditional Mumsnet test by asking him to name his favourite biscuit. 'I don't really like biscuits,' he says stiffly. I'm not entirely certain he understands the significance of the question. 'At a push I'd go for shortbread.'
Could this be why his fellow Tories felt he failed to project the necessary charisma as party leader? Referring to himself as the 'quiet man of politics' didn't help much either. But a year later Duncan Smith had dusted himself down and founded the Centre for Social Justice think tank, with the aim of providing research into poverty, worklessness and social breakdown. It has proved to be highly influential.
Back on the green benches, it's worth noting how rare it is for a former leader or a former minister to visibly enjoy being out of office. But Duncan Smith is a man who remains true to his word, that word being 'vocation'.
'There is no such thing as a political career,' he says. 'Politics is a vocation. It's about people and if you don't like people, then you should find another job.'
After many years in the spotlight, then out of it, this recent humble (but self-evidently not humbled) retention of his seat is turning into quite the golden hour for Duncan Smith. If he's not making waves here by speaking out on the menace of China – something that has resulted in him being sanctioned by its government – he's making headlines in the Kyiv Independent, which quotes him as a 'UK lawmaker' urging Donald Trump not to 'force Ukraine into a bad deal'.
Ukraine is very much on his mind; he organises unofficial cross-party visits as guests of the British charity HopeFull, which delivers food to families on or near the front line. 'It's really important to see conditions for yourself, you need to go as far forward as you can,' he says, every inch the former lieutenant in the Scots Guards who did tours of Northern Ireland and what was Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
As an arch Eurosceptic long before it was fashionable, he is, quite understandably, incandescent at the way Labour is once again aligning Britain with the EU.
' This so-called 'reset' by Starmer is a clear betrayal of Brexit. 17.4 million people voted for Brexit. Now with only 9.7 million votes at the last election he has committed us, having left the EU, to become rule takers again, without any say in the setting of the rules we will have to obey.'
Back home in Britain Duncan Smith is something of an éminence grise; as the architect of Universal Credit while at the Department for Work and Pensions, his specialist subject of welfare reform has risen to the very top of the domestic agenda.
Through his research at the Centre for Social Justice, he has been keenly aware of the multi-generational worklessness blighting communities across Britain for two decades. It is the spiralling benefits bill that has compelled the current Labour Government to play catch-up.
I saw it for myself not so long ago when I visited Grimsby, dubbed 'Britain's worklessness capital' last year, where the ward of East Marsh and Port now houses the country's highest proportion of young people not in employment, education or training. Duncan Smith nods as I recount the desolation and hopelessness I encountered.
'There are lots of places like Grimsby on the coast that were once reliant on the fishing industry,' he says. 'The problem is that people get used to being out of work. When you get your money anyway there's no incentive to get a job; boys and young men end up milling around in groups on the verge of criminality and since Covid people are unable to cope with the ordinary vagaries of life.
'Research we did at the Centre for Social Justice found that 84 per cent of GPs believe we unduly medicate normal emotions.'
This is very much Duncan Smith's personal crusade. Back in 2010, the practising Catholic controversially described people's failure to take up work as a 'sin' and later likened the 'historic mission' of welfare reform to Wilberforce's campaign against the slave trade. Had social media been quite so active back then, I suspect he would have been well and truly cancelled by the liberal wokerati – and he would have cared not a jot.
Few could doubt his genuine engagement with raising people up from poverty and into employment; he felt so strongly about the living wage that he pumped the air with his fists on the floor of the House of Commons – and could be seen shouting 'fantastic' – when George Osborne announced its introduction in 2015.
His own project, Universal Credit, which combined six existing benefits, was devised as a more flexible system that would encourage people into work by merging out-of-work benefits and in-work support into a single monthly payment, so benefits tapered off gradually rather than stopping abruptly.
But Duncan Smith's departure from government was the very definition of abrupt; he resigned after one contretemps with Osborne too many as the 'austerity chancellor' sought to make £4 billion cuts to disability benefits. They were, he said at the time, 'a compromise too far'.
'I said that would be a hammer blow to working people and that a government can't keep taking money off the working poor. Do I regret anything? No, I stopped the cuts so I did the right thing.' There is clearly no love lost between the pair.
Interestingly, Osborne recently intimated on his podcast, Political Currency, which he co-hosts with Ed Balls, that the introduction of Universal Credit, a digital system which has been hailed as the most advanced of its kind, was down to him.
Duncan Smith swiftly, tersely, puts the record straight. 'That is re-writing history,' he says sharply. 'He opposed much of what I was doing.' Right now, the focus is on this Labour Government, which, ironically, is instituting the reforms for which Duncan Smith lobbied. He has already criticised Chancellor Rachel Reeves for cutting £5 billion from the welfare budget.
'They're trying to plug a hole in the budget so they don't break a fiscal rule which they created in the first place and it's just madness,' he says, animatedly. 'I believe in reform not cuts for their own sake. Labour has an opportunity to use Universal Credit to reform welfare but only if they choose to do it properly, in the way I proposed. Welfare reform means you double down your efforts to get people into employment. Just gerrymandering budgets to get a few billion here by taking it from there won't work.
'Human engagement is needed; you need to understand why people aren't working and help them find a way through that. The by-product of reforming benefits is saving money.
'What I left behind will enable them to do this if they want to. I am here if anyone wants to talk to me.'
For some on the far-Left however, Sir Iain Duncan Smith – he was ennobled in the 2020 New Year Honours – or IDS, as he is known in the House, will always remain a Right-wing bogeyman; his is a name that still provokes more brickbats than bouquets.
In October 2021 he had a traffic cone put on his head and was verbally harangued outside the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester. The incidents went to court, where the judge famously ruled that calling him 'Tory scum' didn't constitute abuse.
'I think it's a rather limited phrase and shows a lack of imagination,' he reflects, dismissively. 'It's so unoriginal and hackneyed – people shout it all the time, and I just think, 'Really? Is that really the best you can come up with?' I just laugh.'
I'm not sure he does laugh, at least not in the conventional sense. Perhaps a sort of peremptory bark? The son of RAF Second World War ace Wilfrid George Gerald Duncan Smith, he was born in Edinburgh and grew up in the Midlands. From the age of 14 he was educated at HMS Conway on Anglesey, a boarding school for Navy hopefuls.
He later attended Sandhurst, and was then commissioned into the Scots Guards, where he spent six years and saw active duty. In the 1980s he worked for GEC Marconi before Westminster beckoned and judging from his current enthusiasm, he has no intention of bowing out any time soon. Why would he, when he finds himself living through interesting times and, being a rank and file MP, has carte blanche to voice his opinions.
Does he believe Starmer is doing a good job in managing disrupter-in-chief Donald Trump? Here, Duncan Smith is clear-eyed and unpartisan. 'Any government knows it is crucial we don't allow a breakdown between the US and Europe. Britain has played the role of mediator again and again over the years and Starmer needs to keep Trump's ear and convey that there might be better ways to do things.
'There aren't going to be any major problems from the Conservatives if the Government does the right thing by reaching out to the US and making sure Britain succeeds in making the trade arrangements that need to be done.'
As far as Duncan Smith is concerned there is not an hour of the day to be wasted. When he's not in Westminster, he and Betsy live in Buckinghamshire on his father-in-law's estate; she is the daughter of the 5th Baron Cottesloe. At home, he paints – he shows me pictures of really rather fine oil paintings on his phone – he occasionally gardens 'under close supervision' and he enjoys nothing more than the restorative solitude of fly-fishing.
'There's a Babylonian proverb that goes something like 'God does not take from man's allotted span the time spent fishing'.' And he smiles, before striding off down the corridor to agitate and annoy.