Iain Duncan Smith was defending welfare reform from his own colleagues as well as the Left

Compassionate Conservatism has taken a bit of a kicking in the past few months: from leftwing critics who want to claim it is dead (but who always disagreed with its central premise anyway) and from certain Conservatives such as George Osborne who prefer a nice political dividing line. But today, as previewed in the Spectator last week, Iain Duncan Smith restated the need for this key strand of Tory thinking, and he set it firmly within the Conservative reforming tradition, saying:

‘As Conservatives, that is part of our Party’s historic mission – just look at Wilberforce and Shaftesbury – to put...