In case anyone thinks that Mathew Parris was ever a leftie.
" In 1984, Parris, at the time a freshly elected Tory MP flushed with enthusiasm for the Thatcherdom, agreed to try living for a week in a Newcastle bedsit on £26.80, the supplementary benefit paid to a single unemployed man.
For the Benefit of Mr Parris, a World in Action documentary that drew a record 13 million viewers, showed "the comfortable Tory MP for West Derbyshire", as Julian Barnes called him in an Observer review, informing an audience of Tory ladies that unemployment "should be uncomfortable", in order to sharpen the appetites of the jobless for work.
Since the government of which he was a member had just cut benefits by 5% and was presiding – as Parris himself wrote – "over an economy in which whole forests of jobs in manufacturing were falling to the monetarist axe", a lot of people wanted to see how he would survive his week. He didn't."
(from an article in The Guardian after Ian Duncan Smith pretended he would be able to survive on JSA.)
Conservative through and through, but now seeing through Boris Johnson
