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Relations between Rachel Reeves and Iain Duncan Smith recently reached a new low when the Work and Pensions Secretary refused to apologise for accusing his shadow of not bothering to turn up for a vote.
Reeves said: “The Secretary of State criticised me for not turning up to vote on an Opposition day motion last week. He knows nothing of why I was not able to attend last week. I kindly ask him to withdraw his criticism and apologise for the aspersion that I could not be bothered to turn up to vote in the House of Commons.” (Her absence was due to illness.)
But Duncan Smith refused to do so, declaring: “I simply made the point that it was good to see the hon. Lady here because she did not turn up to vote in the last debate. I understand that she retweeted that she was Rochester at the time. She was not put down as a signatory to the motion. Those are the points that I made.”
Reeves replied: “Thank you, Mr Speaker. I was not in Rochester last week. I will give the Secretary of State one last opportunity to withdraw the aspersion and apologise. He knows nothing of the reason why I was not here last week, so I ask him to withdraw the aspersion and apologise.” But Duncan Smith was unrepentant: “I stand by my assertion that the hon. Lady did not vote and that her name was not on the Order Paper.”
Now, in an interview with me in this week’s New Statesman, Reeves has revealed that “a number of Tory MPs” came up to her afterwards to apologise for Duncan Smith’s behaviour. She told me:
I think that he’s an incredibly rude man and I think that anybody else would have apologised. And, actually, the number of MPs from the Conservative Party came up to me afterwards and said that they thought that Iain Duncan Smith behaved very badly and wanted to apologise on his behalf, which was very nice of them, but they don’t need to apologise on his behalf, he’s quite capable of apologising for himself.
When I asked Reeves whether she was surprised that Duncan Smith had remained in his job despite multiple policy failures, she replied: “Well, I expect that people like Michael Gove and Owen Paterson, when they were summarily dismissed from their jobs at the last reshuffle must have wondered why the axe came for them but not for Iain Duncan Smith who has presided over £25bn of Tory welfare waste in additional spending compared to what they set out, Universal Credit which has been a huge failure, the bedroom tax, which is probably the cruellest and nastiest policy that we’ve had from this government, devised by Iain Duncan Smith. I think there’s probably a lot of people, not just in the Labour Party, but in the Tory Party and across the country who wonder why someone like that is in his job.”