YP Comment: Tories tumble into turmoil. Osborne humiliated by IDS exit

In truth, however, the former Work and Pensions Secretary’s relationship with Mr Osborne has always been a troubled one.

Mr Duncan Smith is that rarest of political animals, a conviction politician. Since his unfortunate spell as Conservative leader, he has made it his life’s mission to achieve justice for the nation’s poor and his stewardship of the Government’s welfare reforms was the culmination of this.

For Mr Smith, the reshaping of welfare so that it paid people to work rather than spend a lifetime on benefits was never about making cuts. Indeed, 
some of his reforms 
proved very expensive, one reason why the Chancellor had little patience for them. While Mr Osborne was trying to save money, Mr Duncan Smith was trying to save lives, and this is at the root of the dispute between them.

Add to this tension the fact that they are on opposite sides of the Government’s increasingly rancorous split over the European Union referendum and Mr Duncan Smith’s resignation was almost inevitable.

Yet the manner of his departure, with a vicious attack on welfare cuts made for purely political reasons and on a Government he says is balancing the books on the backs of the poor, threatens not merely to derail Mr Osborne’s political career but also to pitch the Tory Party into a state of open civil war.

The Chancellor, viewed by so many as the Tories’ supreme political tactician and David Cameron’s natural successor, is seeing yet another Budget unravel before his eyes as Conservative MPs flock to support Mr Duncan Smith’s charge that it is both wrong and politically damaging to cut disability benefit at the same time as cutting the top rate of tax. This charge is as damaging as it is true and yet Mr Osborne failed to see this.

What the effect will be on a Government already divided over Europe remains to be seen. Not for the first time, however, Mr Cameron can give thanks that so many voters still regard the Labour Party, as led by Jeremy Corbyn, as unelectable.

Home truths: House-building policy lacks foundations

WHEN A government becomes distracted by in-fighting, its policy failures are thrown into ever starker relief.

Not that the failure to build more houses can be laid directly at the present Government’s door, of course, for this has been a dereliction of duty going back decades. Yet, when David Cameron came to power, he had big plans to reverse this and the extent to which they have failed is highlighted today.

According to the charity Shelter, as the average price of a house in England and Wales exceeds £300,000 for the first time, three-quarters of people now feel that it will be impossible for future generations ever to buy a home of their own.

Nor is the situation any less bleak in this region, with homes in Yorkshire costing up to 10 times the average salary, according to the National Housing Federation.

This is a damning indictment of the abject failure to incentivise builders to develop brownfield land and to chart a path through the planning bureaucracy that prevents more homes being built on greenfield sites.

The equation is the same as it has always been: the more homes that are built, the faster their price will come down. But if the problem is an old one, Britain’s fast-growing population means that the urgency to solve it is greater than ever.

Rich legacy: The impact of Barry Hines

FOR THOSE who know nothing of Barry Hines other than that he wrote A Kestrel for a Knave, the book on which the film Kes was based, the tribute by Ian McMillan shows that his legacy stretches much wider.

Commenting after the death of his fellow Barnsley writer, Mr McMillan says that Hines’s book had a huge impact on a generation of Yorkshire writers. “It taught us that people from around here can write,” he explains.

In making the bleak coal-mining lands of South Yorkshire a fit subject for literature, Hines’s writing formed not merely a searing counterpart to the glamour of the so-called Swinging Sixties, it also formed a rich literary seam all its own, one which is still being mined today.