In his book “In It Together” Matthew d’Ancona claims that George Osborne questioned Iain Duncan Smith’s IQ and confided to allies “You see Iain giving presentations, and realise he’s just not clever enough.”

It could be argued that a politician that gave us the bedroom tax, a housing policy that is eloquently summed up by Caroline Lucus , as “nasty, ineffective, counterproductive and unjust ” has clearly demonstrated a degree of ineptitude.

Smith tried to spin the bedroom tax as a way of managing housing stock when it was clear to any serious observer that it was just a benefit cut . For a while that appeared to be quite a clever trick but it backfired when evidence pretty quickly emerged that his policy was impacting terribly on people’s lives, particularly the disabled.

The fact is that Iain Duncan-Smith is a hugely arrogant and dangerous man who really believes he knows better than everyone else and is incapable of recognising or acknowledging his own errors and misjudgements. He also has no qualms about lying to achieve his own ends.

The evidence for this is easily documented.

In 2002 BBC Newsnight revealed that Smith had for years mislead Parliament and the public about his education. He claimed he attended The University of Perugia when he hadn’t:

He also claimed to have been “educated at Dunchurch College of Management” but to all intents and purposes he hadn”t:

In the Betsygate Scandal of 2002 Smith tried to stall a parliamentary investigation into allegations of misconduct by objecting on “procedural grounds” demonstrating his complete disregard and contempt for the integrity of Parliamentary procedures. The report by the House of Commons Committee on Standards and Privileges into the allegations against Smith made it clear that:

“One of the important objectives of the standards system is to maintain public confidence in the integrity of Members of Parliament. A system which allowed Members to escape censure on procedural grounds, whatever the merits of the evidence, would not in our view be conducive in principle to this.”

Mr Smith came away from the Betsygate Scandal with little more than a very light tap on the knuckles but, nevermind, he was destined for loftier deceit.

In 2010 Iain Duncan Smith told MPs: ‘We now know that …..the private marketplace in housing……..fell by around 5% last year. At the same time, LHA rates…….had risen by 3%. There is thus a 7% gap with what is going on in the marketplace.’

Inside Housing looked at the figures and rejected the claim.

Zoe Williams commented in The Guardian:

“what chilled me most was the (relatively) minor lie, put about in November 2010, that private sector rents had fallen by 5% the previous year, while the amount paid by local authorities in housing benefit had gone up by 3% . The clear implication was that people claiming the benefit were on the take – it was never said outright because it would have been functionally impossible (housing benefit is paid directly to the landlord); yet there it was, an impression hanging in the air, yet more craftiness from the feckless spongers.”

In April 2013 Mr Duncan Smith claimed that:

“Around 1 million people have been stuck on a working-age benefit for at least three out of the past four years, despite being judged capable of preparing or looking for work.”

This was a cynical misrepresentation of the figures as pointed out in The Guardian and Full facts at the time.

In June 2013, the pressure group Disabled People Against Cuts produced a report detailing 35 examples of the misuse of statistics by Iain’s department, which it said “demonstrates a consistent pattern of abuse of official statistics by Ministers of the present Government.”

In September 2013 Mr Smith was caught out misleading MP’s over the cost of IT failures in his attempt to introduce Universal Credit. The Guardian reported:

“Iain Duncan Smith has been accused of misleading parliament after it emerged that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) could write off up to £161m spent on an IT system for ambitious welfare changes – more than four times what the minister said would be wasted.”

In an another insightful article in The Guardian Nick Cohen explains why the claim by IDS that his Benefit Cap was working and that “Already we have seen 8,000 people who would have been affected by the cap move into jobs.”  is not supported by the statistics and that his assertion that the Work Programme was a success was also demonstrably untrue.

Vox Political rightly asked why IDS remained in the Government after committing the offense of Contempt of Parliament.

Of Smith Nick Cohen concludes:

“He uses his twisted figures as a crutch instead, to help his dogmas hobble along. Francis Wheen once said that the one fact everyone believes they know about a public figure is always wrong. Whatever they think about his policies, the public assumes that Duncan Smith is a gentleman. He is anything but.”

In December 2014 Iain Duncan Smith insisted he would take ‘no bloody lessons’ from those calling for him to live on £53 a week, saying he had been on the breadline twice.

However, on the occasion he was made redundant in 1979 Smith was married to wealthy aristocrat Elizabeth “Betsy” Fremantle, daughter of the 5th Baron Cottesloe. Smith now lives in a $2 million pound mansion belonging to his father-in-law.

On the 9th March 2014 Iain Duncan Smith was interviewed in the BBC’s Sunday Politics programme. In his blog Johnny Void very effectively highlights the blatant lies that Smith is prepared to tell in defense of his Work Programme,  about the scale of long-term unemployment, about the Bedroom Tax and about the consequences of benefit sanctions.

The Void sums up with this:

“Iain Duncan Smith is now barely even pretending to tell the truth as his welfare reforms unravel in every direction.  It is a pitiful sight to watch, but the impact of his delusions are tragic.” 

In his blog John Pring points out how Smith was caught out in another interview on Channel 4 News in October this year. First he lied about how generous spending on Disability Benefits was in the UK and then he falsely claimed that some groups of disabled people would be exempted from his freeze on benefit rises.

More recently Iain Duncan Smith said the number of people using food banks in the UK is “tiny” compared with Germany,

The UK’s main food bank charity provided food for 913,000 people last year. That’s 1.4% of the population (the actual figure is probably well over a million people using food banks)  and food banks in Germany fed 1.5 million people, or 1.9% of the population.

By using the word tiny Smith has convinced me that he must have now completely lost his grip with reality and that his cognizance has finally drifted off to a place in the universe that is all it’s own.

If only the rest of him would follow it there.

Further reading:

Iain Duncan Smith’s historic links to the far-right

Iain Duncan Smith and Universal Credit – a case of a tool blaming his workmen?