"Never underestimate the determination of a quiet man"
As one of the few, faithful viewers watching him live as he delivered that fateful line, and one of the even fewer who understood just what he meant, and with it the all too familiar destiny of the modern conviction politician, I'm heartened by IDS's words, repeated in today's Daily Mail.
It is meet, to my mind, that he is no longer party leader. On the basis of the ludicrous and frightening responses to the Mail's piece, his views would have to be seriously compromised to gain mass popular support.
Never mind that they are backed up by cold, hard statistics, the kind of facts people like CAFCASS fear the most.
All too often, parliamentarians on their way out eulogise over their 'record', or indeed their 'convictions', and then either vanished without trace or disappointed us once free of the burdensome electorate. Lembit Opik announced he'd found faith, and then promptly did stand-up comedy... 'nuff said.
Mr Duncan-Smith's 'quiet' record since he vacated the Tory hot-seat has demonstrated that his words to that largely apathetic conference audience in 2003 were truly a statement of conviction. He left the stage and went to work. The Centre for Social Justice, set up within a year of his ceding of office, is already part of his legacy and working hard for the cause of families.
It is encouraging, too that he has met such violent opposition. It's a sign that we who cherish the sanctity of marriage and family life are on the march.
My brand of Christian upbringing taught me that resistance is a sign that you are in danger of making progress.
It puts a spring in Daddy's step today to know a member of the cabinet stands shoulder-to-shoulder with me on such a pressing matter of conscience.
Let's be realistic though.
Mr Duncan-Smith will get a hard time today, not least in his own Whitehall department, conditioned as it as been by over a decade of post-modernist Labour marriage-bashing.
It takes guts to speak the truth, when an evil world is baying for comfortable, self-affirming lies.
Similarly, it is much more popular to generically bash 'self-serving politicians' than it is to identify with, and thereby be judged alongside, such a man of conviction.
We should pray for IDS today, and others like him, that he might feel encouraged in his stand, and hold his nerve.
We can aspire to his bravery by first affirming it.
Love from Daddy
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