Digby Chicken Caesar wrote: ↑Wed Aug 05, 2020 8:26 pm
He had a distinguished military career before politics, was leader of his party, a cabinet member for 6 years and
a leading voice in the successful leave campaign.
What have you done?
Oh the pure irony of it all.
You decide to paint Iain Smith in a favourable light. That's clearly your choice. However, for balance, let's take this opportunity to dig a little deeper into what kind of person he truly is.
- When he was Tory Party Leader, his Conservative Party Biography claimed he had been a Director at GEC Marconi. This was an outright lie, as he was just a junior marketing executive.
- After spending seven years with GEC Marconi (1981-88), IDS joined a property company, Bellwinch Property Ltd, but was made redundant after six months. He stated
“later on in life when I worked my way up I was made redundant, I again had to start all over again from scratch and this time I had kids. I didn’t have any financial backing and I had to pick up the pieces, find another job and get back to work.” Perhaps the 1989 “on the breadline” claim would hold water if he hadn’t, errr, married into the aristocracy seven years earlier? His father-in-law is 5th Baron Cottesloe, in whose £2m country house Duncan Smith now lives.
- His 2001 biography on the Conservative Party website, his entry in Who’s Who, and various other places, stated that he went to the Universita di Perugia in Italy.This is not true: his office now admit that he went to the Universita per Stranieri, which is simply in Perugia. His office also admitted to the Newsnight programme, that he didn’t get any qualifications in Perugia - nor did he even finish his exams!
-- Back in 2002, the then Tory leader was exposed by BBC Newsnight for lying on his CV. “Dunchurch College of Management” appeared in the very first line of his official biography on the Tory party website. However, investigations revealed that he did not receive any qualifications from what was essentially the staff college for his employer GEC Marconi, at which he attended several short courses lasting a few days.
- His Bio also promotes him to the rank of Captain, which is an achievement that seems to have escaped the notice of his regiment. His boast to have been in Zimbabwe carrying the General’s feathery cap is largely true, although the bio claims the appointment continued to 1981, long after independence, which is either another lie, or the General left him behind. Unrecorded is how he got this cushy gig, but maybe the fact that the General and his father in law, Lord Cottesloe (remember him from earlier?), were contemporaries at Eton is nothing more than just a happy coincidence.
- I seem to recall that when he was Leader of the Opposition on £100,000 per year, he was still claiming expenses to pay his wife (remember 'Betsygate'?) to do very light secretarial work. Nice work if you can get it.
- He has previous for being one of the biggest H.O.C. conmen going - claiming £168 on 160 yellow dusters and claiming £39 for a breakfast speaks volumes. Hasn’t he heard of poundland? In October 2003, a senior aide – Dr Vanessa Gearson, gave written evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Standards and Privileges about the scandal. In her written statement Dr Gearson revealed that she had written an email to Conservative Central Office expressing her concerns about IDS claiming money from the taxpayer for his own personal expenses - for example his lunches, haircuts, food for his own home, a mirror for his flat, his laundry and – his underwear!
- He also believed (in 2013), that people could live on £53 per week. Despite repeatedly being asked, he declined to take a week out and show people how.
- In December 2013, he told blatant lies to parliament regarding what he knew (and when) in respect of the failure of his flagship Universal Credit policy. Rather than confess what a disaster Universal Credit had become, he then decided to blame the whole fiasco on senior civil servants — throwing his permanent secretary Robert Devereux under a bus by claiming he had been kept in the dark. Nice.
- In June 2015, he told the Commons that his department didn’t hold data on disability and sickness benefit recipients who had died within six weeks of their claims being rejected. Unfortunately for him however, his own department had … errrr … already admitted that it did hold this information and planned to publish it at some point in the future. In a letter Debbie Abrahams MP, Cameron also denied that Duncan Smith had “allowed a culture to be established in which it is acceptable to lie.”
The culture of lying then came in the form of Brexit -
something which evidently (from the clip above) Iain Smith is still trying to get his head around.
So summing up - an all-round good egg?
Or a pompous, lying, heartless, clueless, tax payers' money-grabbing charlatan?
I know which way the evidence is stacked.