Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Full-length interview with IDS

I have interviewed Iain Duncan Smith for tomorrow’s Spectator. In print, space is always tight and we kept it to 1,500 words. One of the beauties of online is that you can go into detail in political debate that you never could with print: facts, graphs (my guilty pleasure) and quotes. Here is a 2,300-word version of the IDS interview, with subheadings so CoffeeHousers can skip the parts that don’t interest them. I’ve known him for years, and remember how hard it was to get out of his room four years ago when he started on the subject of gang culture and the merits early intervention. Now, he’s in the DWP, able to enact all he spoke about. He believes the riots will transform Cameron’s premiership in the same way that 9-11 did Blair’s. Britain as a country, he says, is in the last-chance saloon. The riots were a warning: not a crisis, but a prelude to a crisis unless they are fixed. James Forsyth’s cover story tomorrow looks at how likely Cameron is to do so. But here’s IDS:
 
Most politicians who hang pictures of battle scenes in their office do so from a sense of nostalgia. For Iain Duncan Smith, it is about militaristic feng shui. Since becoming Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the former soldier has approached his job as he would a battle. The abstract pictures he inherited from his predecessor, Yvette Cooper, have been replaced with scenes of the Duke of Malborough’s victories. When a group of officials came to visit him just after he changed the decor, they told him it felt like the Ministry of Defence. “That’s right,” he replied. “I want you to know that from now on, this is the war room.”

The London riots were, for him, simply the most spectacular manifestation of another war: that being fought, and lost, on the streets of Britain’s inner cities.

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