If you’d judged the success of universal credit purely on Iain Duncan Smith’s tone at the Work and Pensions select committee this afternoon, you might conclude that things weren’t going very well at all. IDS was in a fabulously grumpy mood this morning on the Today programme, muttering about the presenters trying to find fault, and he didn’t seem to have cheered up by the time he arrived in the Wilson Room for his select committee grilling, accusing Labour MP Debbie Abrahams of ‘moaning’ and Glenda Jackson of ‘conflating so many issues here, it’s almost becoming risible’.
So what did we learn? IDS insisted that ‘in essence it will be delivered by 2017’: his plan was still the same as the original one he’d outlined to them in September. He added: ‘This is what Howard Shiplee is saying, with the one exception, for reasons I think I’ve made obvious, in essence that was the plan delivered.
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