The Arse and its Hole

Mere evidence, for what little that is worth, notoriously suggests that the main trouble with faith-based policy is that reality will eventually rear up and bite you on the arse. When the object of your faith is itself an arse, the results may be anatomically distinct, but will almost certainly be equally inconvenient.

During what is tactfully referred to as his leadership of the Conservative Party, Iain Duncan Smith once saw some poor folk in Glasgow and then, only a year later, announced that he wanted the Conservatives to become the "party for the poor". Once in government, Duncan Smith naturally decided that poverty has nothing to do with lack of money and set about removing benefits and ordering cancer patients to drag themselves up before the Idleness Police. Apparently this has caused a degree of surprise to the community activist who was Duncan Smith's host in Glasgow and whom Duncan Smith credits with opening his flat dead eyes to the "problems and pockets of poverty across the UK". Bob Holman thought Duncan Smith "a decent man", apparently on the strength of a few crocodile tears and a bit of proto-Daveybloke posturing; perhaps Holman assumed, like many of us, that Duncan Smith was simply too stupid to lie. As we now know, that is always a dangerous assumption to make about any politician, even one of Duncan Smith's gluteal calibre.

Nevertheless, Holman now believes that Duncan Smith, like Nick Clegg and other honest chaps, has been forced by the Treasury to implement cuts against his will, and calls for him to resign and campaign for a Big Society. Given his brilliant record, it is unlikely Duncan Smith would be allowed to reply even should courtesy incline him to do so; be that as it may, the Ministry of Forced Labour and Social Cleansing extruded a spokesbeing to state on his behalf that there would be no comment. In public relations if in nothing else, the Government can still sometimes refrain from digging itself a deeper hole.