Iain Duncan Smith – They smell blood

Whoever’s orchestrating the campaign against Iain Duncan Smith should plainly be the Conservative Party’s spin doctor. To blow up an unproved matter of paying your wife money for nothing into something akin to The Hutton Inquiry is a masterpiece. Not one I agree with, however – it’s not a bundle of fun watching a man who’s only fault is to have more morals than most of the other politicians being torn apart. He’s mounting a staunch defence (see this article, and this video, from ITV); one that suggests he knows this is the time to do or die.
While most political observers can smell the cynical stench of “death by media”, his critics can really smell the blood and are royally shafting him from all sides. They say he can’t possibly call the offenders into line, because he stepped out of line under the Major government. So a political leader’s only hope of being strict with his peers is to be a drone as a backbencher? They say that if he doesn’t buck up the Tories in the opinion polls, he’ll have to go. But what chance does he have, when at the first sign of recovery (the Tories lead by 5 points, says the BBC), they bundle in to ruin his name, his wife, his reputation and possibly the entire party? Labour-leaning Mirror journalists couldn’t have done a better hatchet job. I suppose they all think they are better leaders. Maybe they are in their own opinion, but they are just as unproven a leader as Arnold Schwarzeneggar, and they certainly wouldn’t be as well-equipped for a swift bout down the dark alleys of Westminster.
Duncan Smith, defending his family, has been finally provoked into being the kind of tough leader the Tories wanted 2 years ago; it may be that the moral-free plotters have finally pulled the flokati rug from under his feet.