How to save Conservatism

Iain Duncan Smith may have lost his job, but he has found a new whisky. It’s called Monkey Shoulder, and they became acquainted when he went to lie low in the Highlands after his resignation. When he went to buy a new bottle from Robertsons of Pitlochry he was told he’d have to wait a few days.
‘I told them not to worry, that I had more time on my hands. The man behind me said: “Yes, we know all about that — you were the talk of the town here for days.”’ It’s an example, he says, of how his resignation struck a far deeper chord than he imagined it would.

‘It has been very odd,’ he says. ‘There’s a huge number of letters and emails piling in, saying “thank you”. Scot Nats, Labour people — not chain letters, handwritten ones. It’s been a bit surprising.’ He says he never sought to pose as an anti-cuts martyr — which would, anyway, be unconvincing from the bedroom-tax author who cut welfare more than any of his predecessors. But Duncan Smith chose to resign with such drama — at 9 p.m. on a Friday with a spirited ‘J’accuse’ against the government — in order to warn his party that it is heading in the wrong direction. That it is in danger of being hollowed out, and losing sight of the people to whom it ought to be dedicated.

This week, Duncan Smith has been in Washington to address Republicans interested in what George W. Bush called ‘compassionate Conservatism’. Many names have been attached to the basic idea, articulated by Irving Kristol and Milton Friedman, that government welfare schemes tend to entrench poverty, rather than alleviate it. As Duncan Smith put it in his speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Conservatives ought to abhor the ‘feed-and-forget compassion’ of the left, and judge welfare by the extent to which it saves lives, not just money.