Knighting Britain’s real-life Scrooge Iain Duncan Smith exposes our honours system for the sham it is

Arise, Sir Ebenezer

Even before it was leaked, anybody with a macabre interest in shiny-pated sweethearts knew Iain Duncan Smith’s address.

For the benefit of latecomers to this mirthless party, Duncan Smith lives in a Buckinghamshire mansion owned until his recent death by his father-in-law, the fifth Baron Cottesloe.

He has never paid rent on the sumptuous home (nor tax on its vacant bedrooms) in which this rarefied benefits scrounger conceived universal credit.

If his knighthood doesn’t qualify as an adequately brutal satirical comment on the honours system, perhaps the leaking of his and some thousand other addresses does.

Each and every December for decades, the new year honours list has induced the kind of dyspeptic nausea to put festive indigestion in the shade.

This year, peerages for failed MPs, knighthoods for obsequious civil servants (much like those in the Cabinet Office who will in the coming days be frantically passing the buck over the data breach) mingle with pat-on-the-head OBEs for “ordinary men and women” in a One Nation Toryism that means liberally tipping the grouse moor beater.

Yet funnily, it is hard to imagine Sir Iain – as few of us will likely stoop to calling him – handing even a few measly quid to those he seems to regard, in suitably Victorian fashion, as the undeserving poor.

One need not have watched the festive film classic to guess from whom Duncan Smith takes his cue. If you have happened to catch the 1951 Scrooge, scenes of Alistair Sim with London’s destitute may seem oddly familiar.

The difference is that our very own Scrooge has been rewarded for his part in our Dickensian dystopia with a chivalric title.

As a Catholic, Duncan Smith should understand that none of us is beyond redemption. Perhaps one midwinter night, he too will visited by a ghost of Christmas past; the spectre of Philip Balderston, perhaps, the man who died before he could contest the government’s ruling that he was fit to work.

The ghost of Christmas present, meanwhile, might take the form of the disabled person who, marooned by the removal of a mobility scooter, became suicidal with loneliness.

As for the ghost of Christmas yet to come, that feels too bleak to contemplate in the wake of a majority Tory government to which Duncan Smith may yet be recalled.

If those three spirits came to IDS, who knows, he might wake next Christmas Day to the epiphany that Marley’s ghost had a point when he answered Scrooge’s justification of his callousness – “you were always a good man of business” – with “mankind was my business”. I wouldn’t bet the farm, though.

So here’s a small thought for whichever poor sod gets lumbered with the trivial task of saving the Labour Party from its latest flirtation with self-destruction:

• Pledge to reform the honours system from the bottom up. Scrap automatic awards for senior civil servants, the Whitehall version of the City bonus;
• Scrap awards for political hacks. Going beyond the call of duty and licking the rectum of power are not the same thing;
• Jettison awards for entertainers, sportspeople, titans of commerce and others whose talent and success has no connection with whatever a relatively normal human being would confuse with honour;
• Keep the peerages, knighthoods and damehoods by all means, but reserve them for those ritually condescended to by the title of “ordinary people”.

There is nothing ordinary about devoting a lifetime to helping those who need help with no reward in mind. Plato said that the first qualification for holding power should be not wanting it; the same ought to be true of an honour.

Few will have craved their honour as much as Iain Duncan Smith. While the prime minister who gave it to him paid tribute with a rent-free stay in a Mystique villa (commercial value: £40,000 a week), we may picture that gentle, parfait knight beaming with pride as he bestrides the Bucks estate like the smugly cruel dunce we know him to be.

The reforms he incompetently instituted at Work and Pensions were described by the United Nations as systematic violations of human rights. His leadership of the Conservative Party was as laughably clueless as it was blessedly brief. His only discernible gift is an ungodly ability to mouth blatant lies at television cameras without the hint of a blush.

After so many renewals of this reliably repulsive annual festival of corruption and mediocrity, you’d have thought we’d have become inured to its horror. Duncan Smith has proved otherwise. Arise, Sir Ebenezer.