'Duck 'n Dive' Truth About BBC 'Welfare Victim'

[Teddy Bear]

This story tells of a man who left a message on the BBC’s website criticising welfare cuts. ‘I put a comment on saying David Cameron can stick his Big Society where the sun doesn’t shine, or words to that effect,’ he said. ‘As a result I was invited to go to Newcastle and be interviewed by John Humphrys.’

It's understandable why his words would be 'music to the BBC ears', so they got him to come from his home in County Durham to Newcastle to appear on the programme, and 'lay it on' Tory MP Ian Duncan Smith, which he dutifully did.

He told Today he had worked as a credit manager for most of his life, until he was made redundant three years ago.

He set up a new business as a self-employed market trader and said he worked up to 70 hours a week, sometimes working every day, but that he had earned only £2,700 in 14 months.

Mr Bennett said he was forced to borrow money to pay his rent after his housing benefit was cut from £75 a week to just £57, and he was made to pay £5 a week toward council tax.

So we are to believe he works 70 hours a week as a market trader to make less than £200 a month. meaning he makes considerably less than £1 an hour.

Anybody believe that?
Clearly that's what he states to Income Tax and the welfare people, and being self-employed in a cash business, unless somebody is going to watch his transactions, it would be impossible to prove otherwise, except for common sense. Hard to swallow especially as he sells cold weather clothing like hats, gloves, scarves and duvets. One would think this must have been a bumper year for him.

The Daily Mail did a little investigation into this man and found out the divorced father of two is a regular gambler who boasts his hobbies are ‘football, poker and beer’.

So where does the money come from for this 'poor hard working welfare receiver to indulge in these pastimes?

The BBC were obviously too excited about having this man to challenge IDS to use any common sense surrounding his claims. So when confronted with the Daily Mail findings they said:

A BBC spokesman defended Mr Bennett’s interview on the Today programme and said the corporation stood by his account.

The spokesman claimed staff had checked his story, adding: ‘We stand by the interview, which was used to illustrate how the changes to the welfare system might affect people within a wider piece, including a lengthy interview with Iain Duncan Smith. Mr Bennett outlined his circumstances, but was also questioned robustly.’

The BBC will believe anything that suits their agenda.

I'm a ducker and a diver: Truth about BBC 'welfare victim' who dared Iain Duncan Smith to live on £53 a week

• Work and Pensions Secretary had radio showdown with benefits claimant
  
• David Bennett, 51, asked ‘Could you survive on £53 a week?’
  
• Bennett told Iain Duncan Smith an emotional account of his finances
  
• He later defended his gambling habit: ‘I won more money than I lost’
  
• Petition calling on IDS to live up to promise signed by 150,000 people
  

By Vanessa Allen and James Chapman

A father who challenged Iain Duncan Smith to live on £53 a week is a gambler and self-confessed ‘ducker and diver’.

David Bennett, 51, who was pictured today working on a market stall, told the BBC he was struggling to survive after his housing benefit was cut, despite working up to 70 hours a week.

In an emotional interview on Radio 4’s flagship news show Today, the market trader said he was no scrounger, all his money went on rent and bills and he was forced to borrow to survive.

But the Daily Mail can reveal the divorced father of two is a regular gambler who boasts his hobbies are ‘football, poker and beer’.

Mr Bennett’s Twitter account even had the profile: ‘Poker player, self-employed ducker and diver’. Yesterday it was changed to ‘Market trader’.

In February, he tweeted to two gambling tipsters, telling them: ‘Rough day today lads, gonna have to find your magic potion again soon.’ The month before he tweeted he had won an accumulator bet at odds of 28/1.

He also had accounts on poker websites and, in December, used part of an inheritance from his grandmother to gamble at the card game.

Confronted about his betting, Mr Bennett told a Mail reporter: ‘I won more money than I lost.’

He said he was asked onto Today after he left a message on the BBC’s website criticising welfare cuts. ‘I put a comment on saying David Cameron can stick his Big Society where the sun doesn’t shine, or words to that effect,’ he said. ‘As a result I was invited to go to Newcastle and be interviewed by John Humphrys.’

Asked on Saturday’s programme whether he had any questions for Mr Duncan Smith, Mr Bennett snorted derisively and said: ‘Could you survive on £53 a week?’ Mr Humphrys put the question to the millionaire former Tory leader, who replied: ‘If I had to I would.’

The exchange prompted an online petition which has attracted more than 150,000 signatures calling for the Work and Pensions Secretary to forego his £134,565-a-year salary and live on Mr Bennett’s income for at least a year.

It states: 'This petition calls on Iain Duncan Smith to live on this budget for at least one year. This would help realise the Conservative Party's current mantra that "We are all in this together".

'This would mean a 97 per cent reduction in his current income, which is £1,581.02 a week or £225 a day after tax.'

But the Daily Mail’s investigation into Mr Bennett’s claims raise questions about his account, and the BBC’s decision to give him such a high-profile platform.

He told Today he had worked as a credit manager for most of his life, until he was made redundant three years ago.

He set up a new business as a self-employed market trader and said he worked up to 70 hours a week, sometimes working every day, but that he had earned only £2,700 in 14 months.

Mr Bennett said he was forced to borrow money to pay his rent after his housing benefit was cut from £75 a week to just £57, and he was made to pay £5 a week toward council tax.

He told the programme: ‘I work for a living, I’ve always worked for a living, I’ve worked since I have been 17 years old. I put a lot of money in taxes and national insurance but what I’m finding now is that it’s hard times. Why would I consider myself a scrounger?

‘I try to stand on my own two feet. Conditions have gone against us. Everybody hits hard times every now and again. If the Government wants to class me as a scrounger that’s entirely their problem.’

Mr Bennett, from Hunwick, County Durham, said he did not claim child benefits for his children, aged ten and 14, because his ex-wife was their main carer. Mr Bennett said he was paid housing benefit and working tax credit, and earned around £200 a month from his stall, giving him a total monthly income of £633.

He pays £400 in rent per month and around £176 in utility bills, but also pays for a landline, mobile phone and Sky with broadband.

He claims his bills leave him with £23 a month, meaning even a £10 bet would account for almost half of his monthly disposable income.

Mr Bennett said the ‘terrible’ weather conditions meant he had only been able to work on his stall for 21 days so far this year – around seven days a month – despite selling cold weather gear including hats, gloves, scarves and duvets.

‘There have been some days when I didn’t have enough money to put the diesel in the van and go to work.

He added: ‘It’s been bad year, I used my money to invest in myself and I’ve found myself in a double dip recession.

‘I don’t want to make this political, but the politicians are just rich Tory boys who don’t live in the real world. They are hitting the people who don’t vote for them.’

His life is a world apart from that of Mr Duncan Smith, who lives in a £2million Tudor house on a sprawling estate in Buckinghamshire, with swimming pool and tennis courts.

The mansion – dubbed a ‘mini-Chequers’ – is the ancestral home of the Old Etonian’s wife Betsy, who comes from a multi-millionaire aristocratic family.

Mr Duncan Smith lived on benefits himself after he left the Army and had a more recent taste of life on welfare when he briefly stayed on one of Britain’s toughest housing estates for a Channel 4 documentary.
David Blanchflower

Economist David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, tweeted: 'Wonder how IDS would buy clothes shoes heat on 53 quid a week? Barely enough to buy food I assume. Rent?'

He said ministers were trying to lower the welfare bill ‘in a way that we can be as fair as possible – without slashing or attacking people but trying to reform it and change it’.

‘Successive governments have come in and when they’ve had a problem they’ve cut welfare bills and then later on they’ve ballooned again,’ he added. ‘What I’m trying to do ... is to change the process so that we end up restructuring the culture so that people find that work always pays.’

A BBC spokesman defended Mr Bennett’s interview on the Today programme and said the corporation stood by his account.

The spokesman claimed staff had checked his story, adding: ‘We stand by the interview, which was used to illustrate how the changes to the welfare system might affect people within a wider piece, including a lengthy interview with Iain Duncan Smith. Mr Bennett outlined his circumstances, but was also questioned robustly.’

[Teddy Bear]

The Mail also comments on the above in the relentless BBC agenda in ridiculing or vilifying any government attempt to cut unjust welfare payments.

Don't let the Left hijack welfare debate

To witness the hysterical shroud-waving of the BBC and the apocalyptic headlines in the Left-wing Press, anyone might believe yesterday marked the beginning of the end of civilisation.

In fact, it was the day the Coalition began at last to rebalance an unsustainable welfare state that has brought the country to its knees, placing a hugely unfair burden on wage-earners while condemning families to hopeless dependency.

True, any changes are bound to throw up hard cases of the kind so eagerly sought out by the liberal media – though, in its hunt for downtrodden ‘victims’, couldn’t the BBC have done better than the self-confessed gambler and ‘ducker and diver’ it dredged up to challenge Iain Duncan Smith to live on £53 a week?

Mr Duncan Smith's reforms richly deserve to succeed. How depressing that, even when advocating hugely popular policies, his supporters are often as unconvincing as his detractors

But then one remarkable feature of the debate is how detached the liberal intelligentsia are from the ‘ordinary’ people they loftily claim to represent.
Indeed, polls show three quarters, including most Labour voters, want real cuts to the welfare budget, whereas the Coalition is merely limiting its growth.

Strikingly, too, the demand for cuts is most clamorous among workers at the bottom of the pay scale, who have felt at first hand the injustice of benefits rising three times faster than wages.

Iain Duncan-Smith's Buckinghamshire home. He is paid £1,581 a week but said he would be able to live on £7.57 per day if he had to
Meanwhile the young, who will be left with the bills for the State’s overspending, agree most strongly of all that the system is being exploited by ‘scroungers’.

So there exists a deep well of support for reform. All that’s lacking among the Tories is the skill and intelligence to draw on it.
Instead, ministers seem constantly defensive and apologetic, allowing a blustering Labour Party, which crippled the country, to corner the debate.

Take the so-called ‘bedroom tax’ – which is no such thing, merely a switch of subsidies from those with surplus rooms to people who need them. (In fact it is Labour, as Richard Littlejohn points out on page 17, that actually proposed a real bedroom tax to drive the elderly from their homes.)
In a spectacular own goal, millionaire Tory chairman Grant Shapps protested that his own sons had to share a bedroom – without mentioning that this is because he uses one of his four as a study.

Where are the Tories like Norman Tebbit, who could articulate policies in ways that chimed with the public’s gut instincts?

Mr Duncan Smith’s reforms richly deserve to succeed. How depressing that, even when advocating hugely popular policies, his supporters are often as unconvincing as his detractors.

[steevo]

If he was a market trader with research/activity up to 70 hours/week and made diddle, he flat out stunk. From March 09 till today, in typical peak and valley fashion, the market has done nothing but make money for those of us willing to risk responsibly. It's not for the emotionalist gambler who can't afford to lose. If true this man is as guilty as sin.

"We stand by the interview, which was used to illustrate how the changes to the welfare system might affect people within a wider piece, including a lengthy interview with Iain Duncan Smith. Mr Bennett outlined his circumstances, but was also questioned robustly." That looks a bit like the increasingly accepted MO justification for big Left media. In spite of factual inaccuracy it's ultimate 'intent' that really matters. They "stand by it" because they're just right.

[Teddy Bear]

I think you understand him to be the other kind of market trader - as in stock market Steevo
This guy has a stall in a market, like along a high street, something quite common in this country.
For sure though he made A LOT more money than he claimed.
I hope the inland revenue will be sent out, and by some means keep their eye on his revenue taken in.

[steevo]

I'm an American

[Teddy Bear]

Anybody hoping optimistically for the incoming Director General, Tony Hall, to do anything to redress BBC Bias need only read this to see 'it ain't gonna happen'.

This is why redressing the balance should be the new director general’s top priority – more important even than clearing up the fallout from the Jimmy Savile scandal and tackling the Corporation’s monstrous overstaffing.

How deeply depressing, then, that on his first day in the job, the gurning Lord Hall (who, let’s not forget, has appointed senior New Labourite James Purnell as his strategy director) flatly denied that the BBC is Left-of-centre.

How can the public hope for him to address this acute problem if he won’t even acknowledge that it exists?

A gurning DG and the question of bias

Striking comic poses for the cameras, Tony Hall arrives for his first day at work as by far the most influential figure in the British media. Though his demeanour may lack Reithian gravitas, his exuberance is easy to understand.

For as director general of the BBC, Lord Hall will preside over a Corporation that, despite all its recent scandals, retains a hugely special place in the life and affections of the nation.

True, its monopoly of the airwaves has long gone. But for millions, it is still the default choice of entertainment.

Even more important, it remains the nation’s primary source of news and comment, giving it a role in our democracy whose importance can hardly be exaggerated.
tny hall

Lord Hall's job carries an enormous responsibility to ensure that the BBC's coverage is factual and fair

With its unique access to public funding, it employs more journalists than all Fleet Street put together, enjoying a dominance of current affairs coverage that leaves even its biggest print rivals looking like minnows beside a whale.

Indeed, the BBC is the prism through which politics is seen in Britain. It sets the agenda for the national debate.

Dancing and striking poses for the waiting cameras, Lord Hall arrives for his first day at work as by far the most influential figure in the British media, as the new director general of the BBC

This is why Lord Hall’s job carries such an enormous responsibility to ensure that its coverage is factual and fair.

As millions have long had cause to complain, this is a responsibility that his predecessors have failed lamentably to live up to.

Instead, they have allowed Left-of-centre attitudes – pro-EU, pro-mass immigration and pro-unrestrained state spending – to colour current affairs output. And this bias is all the more insidious for being subconscious.

Nowhere has this pink-tinged mindset been better exemplified than in the BBC’s treatment of Iain Duncan Smith’s benefit reforms.
It seems that the BBC sees every modest attempt to trim public spending, such as Iain Duncan Smith's welfare reforms as a wanton act of cruelty

It seems that the BBC sees every modest attempt to trim public spending, such as Iain Duncan Smith's welfare reforms as a wanton act of cruelty

Ask most humane and sensible voters what they feel about the welfare state, and they will readily agree that Britain needs a safety net to protect its poorest and most vulnerable.

But they will also accept that this country is flat broke, while benefits have ballooned wildly out of control, placing an intolerable tax burden on wage earners, trapping millions in hopeless dependency and distributing handouts to people who clearly don’t need or deserve them.

Yet as seen through the BBC prism, every modest attempt to trim public spending is a wanton act of cruelty.

Only yesterday, even the decision to withdraw legal aid for divorce cases was portrayed as a sadistic assault on the vulnerable.

The format is always the same. Researchers scour the land for ‘victims’ of cuts to parade on the airwaves, with no awkward inquiries made about the veracity of their sob stories.

As for inconvenient truths – such as that 750,000 incapacity benefit claimants have been found medically fit for work, while another 878,000 dropped their claims rather than a face a fresh assessment – these are merely brushed aside.

Meanwhile, the question of how a bankrupt Britain is to pay its debts, and avoid the horrendous fate of Spain and Greece, is seldom raised, and never answered.

This is Tory-bashing at its most infantile – and it pervades all the BBC’s coverage of attempts to reform the public sector, from health to education and local government.

Publicly funded themselves, with lavish perks, pensions and job security almost unknown in the private sector, Corporation staff instinctively make common cause with state employees against politicians they see as ‘Right wing’ (and how telling that BBC strikers said they would go back to work to report Nelson Mandela’s death, but not Margaret Thatcher’s).

Today, this entrenched bias is seriously warping our democracy.

This is why redressing the balance should be the new director general’s top priority – more important even than clearing up the fallout from the Jimmy Savile scandal and tackling the Corporation’s monstrous overstaffing.

How deeply depressing, then, that on his first day in the job, the gurning Lord Hall (who, let’s not forget, has appointed senior New Labourite James Purnell as his strategy director) flatly denied that the BBC is Left-of-centre.

How can the public hope for him to address this acute problem if he won’t even acknowledge that it exists?

[Teddy Bear]

'The BBC is always negative, never explains, never talks about why we are reforming, or the fact that national debt is rising to terrifying levels.' Iain Duncan Smith

Thus speaks IDS following his recent experience being interviewed by John Humphrey on the BBC, and being challenged to live on £53 per week.

While I agree with his observation, I am only frustrated at the fact that instead of railing and criticising them, he's in the best position to do something about it. What has to happen before the government finally does something about the BBC agenda?

Not to get mad - but get even.

My days on the breadline, a disgraceful BBC and the wife whose love sustains me: Iain Duncan Smith hits back at the left

Mr Duncan Smith has been reviled for trying to reform benefits
But the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has had enough

By Andrew Pierce

Memories of the days he spent pounding the streets of London looking for work have played heavily on Iain Duncan Smith this week.

When he casts his mind back to 1981 he sees himself as a very different man — an unemployed soldier returning home each day to his girlfriend’s tiny bedsit in a bleak Victorian house, trying not to lose hope at a time when unemployment levels were nudging to a post-war high of 3 million.

Then a 26-year-old former lieutenant in the Scots Guards, with active service in Rhodesia and Northern Ireland under his belt, Duncan Smith had completed an HGV drivers’ course in his final fortnight in the Army to help prepare him for ‘Civvy Street’.

The reality, he says, was tougher than he had ever imagined — but he survived it.

‘There is always the lofty assumption that Tories like me don’t know what it’s like to live in the real world,’ he says.

It is an assumption that clearly riles him.

Indeed, this week, during a heated interview about his cuts to the welfare state on BBC Radio 4’s flagship news show Today, the Work and Pensions Secretary found himself challenged to live on £53 a week.

Ambushed live on air by 51-year-old market trader David Bennett, who was complaining about cuts to his housing benefit, Duncan Smith was asked if he could survive on such an amount — roughly equivalent to the lowest rate of jobseekers’ allowance.

When the question was put to him directly by the BBC’s John Humphrys, the 58-year-old former Tory leader refused to side-step the question and replied: ‘If I had to, I would.’

Critics of his bid to trim Britain’s monstrous welfare bill swiftly pounced on the idea: an online petition calling for him to forego his £134,565 salary and live on Mr Bennett’s income for a year attracted more than 25,000 signatures on its first day.

But the reality is that Duncan Smith, the son of a World War II RAF hero, doesn’t feel the need to cave in to such cheap publicity stunts.

He’s already been there and done that and learnt valuable lessons about Britain’s benefit system from his own experiences.

In the 20 years I have known Duncan Smith, I have never seen him so animated about any subject as he was this week when I interviewed him in his constituency.

Today, he may be comfortably off, but he told me that as an unemployed ex-serviceman caught up in Britain’s Eighties economic crisis he has already faced the worst of times and learnt how to tighten his belt accordingly.

During those days of hardship, he would leave the house each morning and go looking for work, only returning in the evening after his future wife, Betsy Fremantle, had arrived home from her secretarial job.

He wasn’t even meant to be living there — because he couldn’t afford to pay any rent.

‘The honest truth is that I lived illegally with Betsy in the bedsit, trying to pretend I was not there. I didn’t have any money, which is why I tried to avoid the landlady,’ recalls Duncan Smith.

Inevitably, he was rumbled by the formidable Mrs Fair, who spotted him creeping into the house.

He was allowed to stay after agreeing to do jobs, from wiring plugs to changing light bulbs, and general maintenance.

Duncan Smith and Betsy were living in one room with a one-ring gas oven. ‘We had to keep the meter fed otherwise the gas ran out halfway through cooking dinner,’ he says.

The furniture was tatty, the carpet threadbare, and there was no television but they did have a radio.

They shared the bathroom with three other bedsits.

‘They say love makes everything work,’ recalls a rueful Duncan Smith, who has been married to Betsy for 30 years.

‘Back then, a lot of people didn’t approve of people living together before marriage but we loved each other, we wanted to be together, and we were saving up for a proper wedding.’

Each day he put on his only suit and went to the nearest job exchange and, after another fruitless search, he went to the library .

‘I had the Stock Market Year Book so I could bombard all manner of company directors with letters. I was looking for a job, not benefits, and I wasn’t complaining.’

His cold calling paid off when GEC Marconi offered him the post of junior marketing executive.

‘It was such a relief as I thought I would get a job more quickly,’ he recalls. ‘It took months. I never claimed benefits so the little bit of money I had when I left the Army was running out. We lived economically — there were no treats.’

Betsy bought clothes in second-hand shops, a practice that would stand her family in good stead when unemployment came calling again — more of which later.

It is his experience all that time ago of being unemployed, of scraping by on scarce funds, that today gives Iain Duncan Smith such a sense of empathy with those he is determined to help in his role as Work and Pensions Secretary.

The job is the most difficult in government — a poisoned chalice as he freely admits, not least because under the last government, Britain’s welfare bill soared to £180 billion a year.

It was inevitable that any bid to cut it would provoke an outcry from certain quarters, although perhaps even he did not anticipate the extent to which the Left would try to demonise him as the living embodiment of the so-called evil Conservative government.

Significantly, within 24 hours of being set up opposite Duncan Smith live on air, David Bennett’s self-styled man of the people credentials — which conspicuously were not challenged by the BBC — had unravelled.

Far from living on £53 a week, Mr Bennett who describes himself as a ‘poker-playing ducker and diver’ and lists his interests as football and beer, later admitted he lives on £150-a-week.

The hue and cry surrounding the ‘£53 challenge’ also detracts from the real debate and the truth about Britain’s burgeoning benefits culture.

This week’s life sentence for Mick Philpott for killing six of his children in a house fire has hardened Duncan Smith’s determination to go even further and limit child benefit to the first two children.

Philpott, who claimed £60,000 in benefits a year, had 17 children by five different women.

According to Duncan Smith: ‘It is my view — which has not changed, but we couldn’t get Coalition agreement — that we should limit it to two children.

'It’s not just child benefit but there are also the tax credits and huge and expensive properties the taxpayer has to maintain for these sorts of families.’

Not surprisingly, his hardline stance has focused attention back on his own life.

Fortunately for his enemies, he makes an easy target because he lives today in a £2 million 16th-century house in acres of farmland in Buckinghamshire.

He does not own the house, which belongs to his in-laws Lord and Lady Cottesloe, nor will he inherit it. He moved in a decade ago when Betsy’s parents, who are in their 80s and in frail health, couldn’t manage the property.

‘The personal vilification we have endured over where we live is outrageous,’ he says. ‘I am not involved in the property and Betsy does not have a financial interest. We don’t get a bean from the farm and have never drawn any income from her parents.’

Betsy’s older brother is the heir and he lives abroad doing charity work in India. The house, which is run-down and in need of modernisation, has been in Betsy’s family for centuries.

It was home to Sir Thomas Fremantle, an admiral who served with Lord Nelson in the Napoleonic wars, and whose son, also called Thomas, was a Conservative politician and the first Baron Cottesloe.

Betsy’s grandfather, the 4th Lord Cottesloe, was the unpaid chairman of the Arts Council and instrumental in the creation of the National Theatre. One of the National’s three theatres bears the Cottesloe name.

Duncan Smith says: ‘It is upsetting when they keep on about our privileged lifestyle. When times got tough we adjusted our spending accordingly.’

A case in point is when Duncan Smith left GEC to go to work for a property company called Bellwinch. It was 1988 and the height of the property boom. His timing could not have been worse.

The market crashed and Duncan Smith was unemployed again.

At the time they were living in a flat in Fulham, bought on a mortgage, long before the area became fashionable. Iain had gone to work and Betsy was at home looking after their son and two-month-old daughter.

‘Everything had been going so well. I remember looking out of the office window and seeing the director parking his car.

'He was not expected at the office. I was puzzled and began talking to him about some of the projects we had started.

‘He wasn’t interested. He said: “We are going to have to let you go.” I felt like I had been punched in the stomach.’

There was hardly any pay-off.

‘I couldn’t bring myself to telephone Betsy. I went back to Fulham, walked through the door and said: “I’ve lost my job.” To her credit she said: “We are going to have to work very hard to get you back into work.”

‘I was depressed and felt a failure, like it was all my fault. I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone so went through the pretence that everything was OK. My pride had been knocked to hell. I thought: this isn’t supposed to happen to someone who is keen to get on.’

They invested their meagre savings in an Amstrad computer and started writing letters. Unemployment was rising again and as their savings dwindled, Duncan Smith contacted the building society to reschedule payments on his mortgage.

‘It was an incredibly difficult time. I was running up debts as we were trying to eke out the little bit we had left.’

A lifeline came in the form of a job as publishing director of Jane’s Information group, the defence specialists.

Fast forward two years and Duncan Smith — who had been the Tory candidate in Bradford West at the 1987 General Election — was selected for the plum Conservative constituency of Chingford, succeeding Norman Tebbit, who is one of his great admirers.

In 2001, he became Tory leader but was deposed after two unhappy years.

He might then have given up on politics — in the way that David Miliband who, just over two years after failing to secure the Labour leadership, quit Parliament, triggering an unnecessary and expensive by-election.

Miliband is taking up a post in New York paying a £300,000 salary, having already earned more than £1 million on the international speaking circuit.

After announcing his departure, he was lionised on BBC news programmes without so much as a suggestion that he might have let down his constituents in South Shields.

Duncan Smith, on the other hand, moved on from his disappointing tenure as Tory leader by choosing a very different path, setting up the Centre For Social Justice think tank to examine ways to alleviate poverty and homelessness.

It was while he was leader that his moment of epiphany came, when he visited Glasgow’s sprawling Easterhouse estate where he witnessed generations of families who were locked by welfare dependency into poverty, joblessness and drug addiction.

He was moved to tears by what he saw and embarked on a personal mission to find ways of reaching out to deprived communities.

‘Easterhouse was important,’ he explains. ‘but it was when I was Shadow Social Security Secretary under William Hague that I became wedded to the idea that we had to change the benefits system to reward people who want to work rather than those who want to stay on benefits.’

His determination to see this through was why, when the Coalition came to power, he took on the thankless task of welfare reform as Work and Pensions Secretary.

He clearly believes passionately in the work he is doing, although he despairs at how the Conservatives’ austerity programme is reported — above all, by the BBC.

‘The BBC is always negative, never explains, never talks about why we are reforming, or the fact that national debt is rising to terrifying levels,’ he complains.

‘All the BBC case studies are hard-luck stories like that of the £53-a-week market trader. They never focus on a family stuck on a housing waiting list or in bed-and-breakfast accommodation.’

He is clearly exasperated, too, at how removing the Spare Room Subsidy — which will see housing benefit-payment cuts to council house tenants with surplus spare rooms — has been labelled the ‘bedroom tax’ by Labour.

When the BBC employed the same phrase, Duncan Smith complained. ‘Now they call it the “so-called bedroom tax”. It’s a disgrace.’

He points out that there are 390,000 tenants with two or more extra bedrooms in their homes — bedrooms that could be used to help to alleviate pressure on the 250,000 tenants in overcrowded accommodation, and almost 1.8 million people on the housing waiting list.

Duncan Smith knows the personal abuse will continue and that the Left will continue to exaggerate his wealth. In fact, the only property he owns is a one-bedroom former council flat in London.

Most of the money from the sale of their Fulham home, after they moved in with their in-laws, was spent on their children’s private education. Their eldest son went to a state primary school and won a scholarship to Eton.

When he was Tory leader, Duncan Smith was vilified by some of his own side for his leadership of the party.

‘I promised Betsy that I would never allow her to go through again some of the terrible abuse we suffered back then. But it’s started again, this time from an utterly dishonest Labour party,’ he says.

And this abuse is happening at a time when Betsy is recovering from breast cancer after undergoing extensive chemotherapy.

When the cancer was diagnosed in 2009, Duncan Smith was constantly at her side. For six months, virtually the only time he left the house was to drive his wife to hospital.

Doesn’t she want him to give it all up now for a quiet life together, particularly given the vitriol from the Left that is heading their way?

Duncan Smith says, surprisingly, she does not — a sure sign that they have one of the strongest marriages in politics: ‘Yes, it’s tough for us because sometimes I only see her one or two nights a week.

‘But we are a great team. She believes in what I am doing and will support me to the hilt.’

If only he could say the same of the BBC.