Downing Street sources insist the decision to ditch the cuts was taken earlier on Friday after private talks between the chancellor and prime minister – although they had not had time to discuss this with Duncan Smith.
Advertisement
“This does not add up, it has unravelled, and George Osborne should be explaining what his Budget now is”.
“As far as I could tell, he appeared to spend much of the last few months plotting over Europe and against the leadership of the party and it seemed to me he had been planning to find a reason to resign for a long time”, the BBC reported.
By last night more than a dozen senior Tory MPs – including Bernard Jenkin, Andrew Murrison, William Wragg, Priti Patel, Graham Brady and Shailesh Vara – had expressed sympathy or support for Mr Duncan Smith.
Work and Pensions Secretary Stephen Crabb is adamant that the Conservative party will “get past” the turbulence that has hit the party since the resignation of his predecessor in the post Iain Duncan Smith.
“I am resigning because I want my government to think again about this”, he said. “Iain Duncan Smith had a different view”.
He said cutting disability benefits while cutting taxes was in the Budget was “deeply unfair and was perceived to be unfair” and meant the Conservatives were in danger of losing “the narrative that the Conservative Party was this one nation party caring about those that don’t necessarily vote for it and may never vote for it”. To undo the damage done by this attack, Cameron and Osborne will have to show that this really is a one nation government in both motivation and deed.
“I thought that was a genuinely historic moment for the United Kingdom and particularly for Wales”.
Reports claimed that Mr Cameron had used a four-letter word to describe Mr Duncan Smith during their telephone conversation about his resignation on Friday evening.
A homeless man has married a passerby who he asked change.
“David Cameron and George Osborne must immediately and completely scrap these cuts”.
In a statement, she branded her former boss hard to work for, claimed he had tried to stop her speaking out and argued his departure was all about the EU.
Although she said the Chancellor did not need to present “an entire Budget” to replace last Wednesday’s statement, she suggested that the money to pay for preserving PIP payments should not come from benefits for working-age people, but from savings on support for wealthy pensioners. But what his comments do reveal is growing anger within the Conservative Party about George Osborne’s management of the economy.
Mr Hosie said: “Iain Duncan Smith’s crocodile tears are a distraction from the real issue at hand – while the deep divisions at the top of the Tory party widen and the mud-slinging continues, disabled people and those on low-incomes are still expected to bear the brunt of the Tories’ obsession with austerity”. I suspect that Numbers 10 and 11 will be incandescent about it-Amber Rudd, an Osborne ally, has already declared that she resents IDS’s “high-moral tone”.
Advertisement
Meanwhile, several backbenchers openly undermined Mr Osborne over the row, with others privately declaring his leadership ambitions over. Did Cameron swear at Duncan Smith?
