Iain Duncan Smith, the self-proclaimed “quiet man” of British politics, has been at the helm of the government’s welfare department ever since David Cameron stepped inside Downing Street in May 2010. Many believed the failed party leader had finally found his niche. “A round peg in a round hole,” a BBC profile described the newly appointed work and pensions secretary at the time.
Duncan Smith – or IDS, as he commonly referred to – was born in April 1954 and was the youngest of five children. At 14 he was sent to the boarding school HMS Conway on Anglesey for boys aiming to join the navy. In 1982, he married Betsy, with whom he has four children.
He first entered the Commons a decade later, filling Norman Tebbit’s shoes in the seat of Chingford and Woodford Green. He quickly rose through the ranks to become shadow secretary of defence before his career ambitions took him to the heights of the Conservative party as leader of the opposition from 2001 to 2003.
It was regarded by many at the time as no short of a disaster.
Stuart Wheeler, then one of Conservative party’s biggest donors, threatened to withdraw his generous donations to the party unless Duncan Smith went. “As leader I think he was a disaster,” he said to the BBC. “He lacked gravitas and came over as a weak. He was a bad communicator. One read that he was high-handed with his staff and that his office was shambolic. He’d lose important papers down the back of the sofas.”
Just two years after taking over the reins of the party from William Hague he lost a no confidence vote, forcing him out of the leader’s office.
Tory MP Bernard Jenkin, who was his campaign manager, said in 2010 that Duncan Smith is “not emotionally available. For someone who is so closely associated with compassion he is personally very old-fashioned, you might say”.
Lacking in emotion is what many of Duncan Smith’s critics used against him as he found his “niche” as work and pensions secretary. Over a six-year period he presided over radical and controversial reforms to Britain’s welfare state. And he attempted to create a legacy for himself at the department: universal credit.
Liberal Democrat Steve Webb, the former pensions minister, said of Duncan Smith in 2014: “I respect that as an ex-leader of the Conservative party he could have just gone off, not had any other grief or hassle and been director of a dozen firms and had an easy life.”
