Right! You’ve got 40 minutes,’ says Nick Wood, Iain Duncan Smith’s spin doctor, in the manner of a game-show host. We are sitting round a table in IDS’s office. Nick has a large glass of red wine in his hand and I have water. Iain can’t have a drink, I soon realise, because it would end up all over the wall after one of his emphatic hand gestures.
It has been a good week for IDS, perhaps his best since becoming leader of the opposition. Crispin Blunt may have plunged his dagger, but it turned out to have a rubber blade. The Tories gained more than 600 seats in the council elections, the Liberals failed to break through, and Labour did abysmally. Now is the time for the Tory leader to rout his internal critics, and take the fire into the enemy camp. IDS leans forward, hands clasped, eager to talk about ‘A fair deal’ – the campaign catchphrase for his new domestic policies.
‘We’re trying to demonstrate that the government has got it very badly wrong and that people will notice this failure,’ he says, looking me firmly in the eye. ‘We’re paying more tax but getting worse services. The alternative is a “Fair Deal”, which means that you don’t have to pay through the nose but you do have a right to better services. We’re talking about proper, radical reform.’ Duncan Smith has round eyes, and his skin is smooth and plumped out as if he has been slightly inflated.
In fact, the Fair Deal does sound like exactly the sort of thing this country needs: more choice, less bureaucracy. ‘I’ve been to France, Spain and Sweden and seen what to do,’ says Duncan Smith. ‘We must involve the private and voluntary sectors in a way that no one dares talk about in the Labour government.
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