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Courtesy Independent...........
Prepare your lachrymals for the heart-rending tale of Iain Duncan Smith's
trying months of hardship
Plus: Mad Mel's insane logic on Philpott is incontrovertible; Petronella Wyatt bares
nearly all for a mere £35,000; and Liz Jones, the Rosa Parks of our generation
After the most heart-rending interview since Simon Cowell told The Looking Glass Gazette
of his struggle to find enough Florentine renaissance mirrors to furnish his LA mansion
, how long now before a dramatist writes the Kennexfest drama, The Hardship Months
of Iain Duncan Smith?
Days after IDS's chat with the Daily Mail's Andrew Pierce, the lachrymals still seep over
how, when he left the army in 1981, poverty obliged him to "live illegally" with his future
wife Betsy in a bedsit.
Precisely which legislation the Outlaw Dozy Fails broke is uncertain. It may well have
been the since-repealed Censorious Landlady (Living In Sin) Act, 1956, which carried
a minimum sentence of concerted tutting and old-fashioned looks.
Why IDS, pictured, claimed no benefit while briefly out-of-work is also obscure, though hurried
references to bank savings and Betsy being employed cannot be discounted. Anyway
, this tale of gruelling deprivation explains his fury at the petition asking him to live on £53 a week.
"I have never taken anything from anybody else," thundered this king of self-reliance,
who lives rent-free in his father-in-law's £2m Tudor house.
"I ... make my own bloody way in the world ... The personal vilification we have endured
over where we live is outrageous."
Isn't it though? It's an abhorrence. The stigmatising of those who must rely on housing
benefit, be it from their literal family or the metaphorical one we used to call "the state",
has no place in an all-in-it-together society, and it's tremendous to see this warrior against
social injustice opposing it so strongly.
Keeping culture in the family
We already know, by the way, where The Hardship Months will be staged. The play will debut
at the National's Cottesloe Theatre, named after Betsy's Arts Council stalwart grandfather,
the 4th Baron Cottesloe. The importance of traditional family values in testing times cannot
be overstated.
Thankfully, IDS's in-laws need not scrape by on the one title. Betsy's father, the 5th Lord Cottesloe,
is also the 5th Baron Fremantle of the Austrian Empire. Why Austria saw fit to honour a Thomas
Fremantle in 1816 seems less a mystery than why no one disavowed the title after the
Anschluss, when it effectively fell under Hitler's aegis.
