IDS Faux Sincerity Busted

The inmates of the Westminster bubble have an occasionally tenuous relationship with reality, especially on the fringes of the Tory Party: there was Grant “Spiv” Shapps thinking he could be a credible leadership candidate, Michael “Oiky” Gove believing he could get away with leaking Privy Council confidences to the Sun, and London’s increasingly occasional Mayor Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson claiming to be anti-EU.

Do not underestimate the dishonesty of a coughing man

Into this looking glass world yesterday evening entered the deeply dishonest figure of Iain Duncan Cough, who, after years of picking on the least well off in society and hammering the most vulnerable - those with disabilities - has undergone a Damascene conversion to something called high principles, to the amazement of all those who had concluded that he wouldn’t recognise such things if they jumped up and kicked him in the undercarriage.

Duncan Cough was resigning, he claimed, because Young Dave and next door neighbour Gideon George Oliver Osborne, heir to the seventeenth Baronet, were being jolly rotten to the disabled - rather like he had been since he got his feet under the table at the DWP back in 2010. Very few believed him. Most smelt a rat within seconds of Duncan Cough’s announcement, probably because it contained an unfeasibly large amount of said rat.

There was, let us not drive this one round the houses for too long, zero sincerity in Duncan Cough’s alleged concern for the disabled. He has been hammering them for almost six years. His resignation on those grounds is a sham, a fraud, an act of blatant dishonesty from a deeply dishonest and miserably shallow politician. There are good reasons why he has gone, but none of them involve giving a crap about anyone else.

The DWP has just lost the latest round in its battle to keep information on Duncan Cough’s flagship Universal Credit scheme secret - a battle on which a significant amount of taxpayer funds has already been expended. He can now duck any of the fallout. More importantly, he can now join Bozza and campaign Britain to leave the EU - his resignation is mostly about opportunism; in his dreams, Johnson will give him a job after Dave goes.

That is the kind of fantasy world some Westminster politicians inhabit. The extent of Duncan Cough’s dishonesty was later laid bare by (yes, it’s her again) Nadine Dorries. In an angry Twitter outburst, she claimed “Stunned at IDS resignation letter. I was about to vote against ESA cuts when he sought me out - he personally and angrily begged me not to … Promised me he was introducing a white paper which guaranteed enhanced and more easily accessible benefits for the seriously disabled”. There was more.

“[He] Said the paper would include automatic enhanced benefit qualification for a long list of disabilities including AIDS MS RA MND etc … I am angry that he made me vote for something I did not want to vote for, bribing me with a promise and now HE resigns”. Duncan Cough was prone to talking well, but lying badly. Who knew?

One thing is for sure: Cameron has left Duncan Cough in no doubt that his political career has now ended. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving politician.