CAN'T SPELL IDEAS WITHOUT HIM:

Iain Duncan Smith: the quiet Tory who is making his voice heard:Andrew Pierce meets Iain Duncan Smith, the ridiculed leader who has fought back to win respect (Andrew Pierce, 10/31/09, Daily Telegraph)

Mr Duncan Smith, the first modern political leader to be forced out after losing a motion of no confidence from his own parliamentary party, said trying to persuade Tory MPs to share his interest in social justice was "like shining a pencil torch into a dark void". Today, six years after his expulsion, Mr Duncan Smith's social justice agenda is at the heart of David Cameron's repositioning of the Tory party under the Compassionate Conservatism banner.

"Mrs Thatcher was right [in 1987] to talk about the inner cities. She just never got there," said Mr Duncan Smith. "There are people who thought for far too long in the Conservative Party it's only about the economy. You cannot separate the two. I have had the freedom since 2003 to engage with both."

After he returned to the back benches, Mr Duncan Smith, 55, confounded his critics when he set up the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) in 2004, an independent think tank, to seek solutions to the poverty that has blighted "broken Britain". The Tory party high command has already embraced 67 of its ideas. This week, David Willetts, the party's families' spokesman, said a Cameron government would change the law to ensure grandparents do not lose contact with their grandchildren after a family separation, divorce or bereavement. It came straight from a CSJ paper.

Back in the USSR he would have been called a theoretician. His is the intellect that has shifted the Party back to Thatcherism/Clintonism/Blaisism/Bushism, but Cameron gets to be the official leader.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 31, 2009 6:08 AM