During this time I used to talk regularly to Mr Duncan Smith, and I noticed that he never once blamed the out-of-work or poverty-stricken for their plight. On the contrary, he went to extreme lengths to identify the causes of their problems, so he could help them find a way out of it. It is unthinkable that he would ever have sought to draw a moral distinction between the working poor and the unemployed – those who stay at home, in the vindictive phrase used by Mr Osborne, “with their curtains closed, sleeping off a life on benefits”.