Gang war

There’s a social crisis coming, says Iain Duncan Smith, and we must act now to avert it

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.