Rabbit Foot Spasm Band frontman and devoted working class dad Stuart Macbeth on the spurious reasons cited for resignation by the former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions

Religious festivals inspire miserly men to change tact.

First it was Ebenezer Scrooge, visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. This week it was the turn of Iain Duncan Smith. Or as I shall call him from now on, Iain Duncan Scrooge.

The Ghost swept into the latter’s £2m Buckinghamshire mansion late last week. He went to bed the kind of fellow who would snatch gobstoppers from a schoolboy. By 8pm on Friday night he had become a swashbuckling defender of the poor.

On Sunday’s Andrew Marr show he described himself not as a mansion dweller, but as a humble “semi detached.”

So in touch is Duncan Scrooge with the common man that he now has a small utility room built out back, with a washing machine that drips.

IDS’ resignation letter, protesting harsh welfare cuts from a government who simultaneously slap high earning taxpayers on the back, has already earned itself a place in Britain’s history books. In centuries to come debt-ridden students will puzzle over it, questioning what on earth their ancestors were playing at.

Sufficient vitriol spills from IDS’ 571 words to suggest he is genuinely cross. You can never tell how tightly he has been squeezed by even nastier scrooges up the food chain. Yet much as I welcome the 61 year-old’s change of tact, I struggle to swallow this overnight transformation from bad cop to good cop.

Of course IDS is right to oppose cuts to disability benefits. Of course he is right to suggest tax hikes for the very rich. But ponder the legacy this nasty little man leaves behind.

In his six year career as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions he was chief architect of untold misery. Among his achievements to help disabled people were the slashing of funds for the disabled Access to Work scheme, the abolition of the Independent Living Fund, and the closure of 28 Remploy factories. These sit with multiple cuts among a catalogue of harm and manipulation. If I were Tiny Tim, and Iain Duncan Scrooge showed up on Christmas morning, do you know what I’d do? I’d bolt the door.

Mr Duncan Scrooge now asserts he got into politics because he cares about the British people. This dispels my impression that he got into politics because he couldn’t do anything else. I find his protests admirable, but it’s too little, too late.

If our mate Iain wants to win the widespread support I can only recommend one thing he might do at this stage in his career - buy a funny wig.

Let us laugh at him as they laughed at Scrooge, when he switched from the dark side. Comedy false teeth and loud trousers might complete Iain’s look. He could dance his way into the EU Referendum debates, accompanied by a choreographed assortment of people in wheelchairs.

Because it will take more than one half baked resignation letter to mend the extensive damage he has inflicted.