1 April 2013updated 12 Oct 2023 10:20am

So, Iain Duncan Smith thinks he could live on £53 a week

That's just half the cost of his bluetooth headset.

Iain Duncan Smith has claimed he could live on £53 per week – the amount given to some benefit claimants. The Work and Pensions Secretary said he could survive on £7.57 per day if he “had to”, as he defended a raft of cuts to welfare payments coming into force today.

He’d have to cut back a bit if he did so. According to his parliamentary expenses, he spent £110 – two week’s worth of benefits – on a Bose bluetooth headset for his car, and another £12.42 on a USB cable (I mean, come on, who spends more than a fiver on a USB cable?). His monthly phone bill has been over £53 every month in the latest financial year, so that’s another week each month he can’t eat, travel, heat his house or, really do anything. And given he can claim for travel, he may have forgotten that that £5.30 he spent on taking one tube trip within his constituency also comes out of the £53. Just ten of them and he’d go hungry.

But the bigger point is that it’s easy for someone like Iain Duncan Smith – or me, or, most likely, you, New Statesman reader – to showboat about living on £53 for a week. Just shift some social events around, cut out meat and booze for a while, be more aggressive about using up left-overs, and you’ve pretty much done it. You can watch TV instead of going out, and lentils get boring after a while, but a little turmeric makes them interesting enough to eat for a bit.

But when the next week comes round; and the next; and the next; and still £53 is all you have to live on, it gets harder. Do you give up social events entirely? What happens when your TV license runs out? You may have some books lying around the house now, but you’ll finish them soon enough. And cooking cheap tasty food is easy when you have store-cupboard essentials; it gets harder when you not only have to factor in the cost of them, but also the cost of the electricity you use to cook. That’s not even beginning to examine whether Iain Duncan Smith would be eligible for Housing Benefit in his hypothetical example, or if he’d still be able to happily live rent-free in a £2m house. It seems doubtful that he’d move out to fulfil the example.

The fact is, if you’ve never had to live on that little, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like. The realities of being poor are vastly different to the cheery version the rich put themselves through for charity, or to prove a point, and it’s easy to guess which IDS is imagining.