The ideal employer is polite, thoughtful and friendly. We would all like to work for someone who says on your first day: ??There??s no need to be nervous, I make more errors in my dictation than you possibly could.?? How reassuring it must be for a nervous teenager when the boss inquires whether she has brought a cardigan with her because it is so cold in the office.
However, when you learn that this is how Frau Traudl Junge in her newly published memoirs describes her experience of working as secretary to Adolf Hitler, you may come to think that being nice in the office isn??t everything. You might even prefer to work for Iain Duncan Smith.
IDS does seem to find it difficult to keep staff. At times one gets the feeling that the only employee either in Conservative Central Office or his own office who has not complained of maltreatment is his long-suffering wife Betsy.
Even the hardhearted must shed a tear for Mrs Duncan Smith. First of all she is saddled with the role of consort to the leader of the opposition, possibly the most thankless and gruelling job in politics. Then she is sniffed at by the media for being ??only?? a wife and mother.
Now when it turns out that, on the contrary, for the past decade she has been acting as secretary to her husband as well as bringing up their four children, Jeremy Paxman demands to see her time sheets.
I am all in favour of Sir Philip Mawer, the parliamentary standards commissioner, conducting the most rigorous inquiry into Michael Crick??s allegations that IDS has been misusing his allowances. These allowances are so juicy now that they offer a standing temptation to hard-up MPs. Besides, there is an impression that so far Sir Philip has been less of a terrier than his predecessor, Elizabeth Filkin.
But it really is absurd to suggest, as some of his critics have done, that Duncan Smith is unfit to go on leading the Conservative party simply because his office may be a bit chaotic or because there exists mutual distrust and loathing between himself and some people in Central Office.
This internal rancour has, after all, become as traditional in the Conservative party as fireworks on November 5. Time and again Margaret Thatcher appointed a supposedly safe pair of hands to chair the party ?? Peter Thorneycroft, Norman Tebbit, Kenneth Baker ?? and one by one they fell under suspicion of disloyalty or incompetence, or both. Through the unhappier leaderships of John Major and William Hague, the paranoia went from bad to worse.
As for rudeness to colleagues or to anyone else, who could equal Sir Edward Heath, holder until his recent sad illness of the UK allcomers?? record for incivility (only occasionally challenged in this field by the Duke of Edinburgh)? The objection to Duncan Smith??s style is not that his manners are imperfect. It is that he has failed to impose any semblance of authority upon his squabbling followers. If he is rude, his rudeness has failed to inspire terror or even obedience.
Central Office has been a snakepit for years, but they used to be grass snakes, not vipers. Discontented officials would not have had so little hesitation in flagrantly briefing against their leader and contradicting his version of events. You sense that recklessness that seeps through an organisation where staff have come to think that the chief is for the chop and there is nothing to be lost by speaking their mind.
Duncan Smith clearly senses this, too, which is why he has been charging into the studios promising to shoot the living daylights out of anyone who impugns his wife??s honour. But turning deliberately nasty at this late stage tends rather to underline lack of authority than to reinforce it. And anyway, such rampaging on the cool medium of television always comes over as shrill and put-on (see Alastair Campbell and Channel 4 News).
How can he ever hope to overcome this lack of authority when it is rooted in his origins as a Maastricht rebel who began plotting to undermine Major??s fragile majority the moment he entered the House of Commons? That rebellion, in fact, was just about all he was notable for in his brief parliamentary career before becoming leader.
From this starting position it is no surprise that he has failed to engender any semblance of party solidarity. The shadow cabinet remains shadowy, while the substantial figures continue to skulk and sulk outside ?? Ken Clarke, Michael Portillo, William Hague, Francis Maude and half a dozen more.
As a desperate remedy, Duncan Smith chivvies his helpers on to produce eyecatching new policies ?? abolishing university fees, linking pensions to earnings ?? which only remind me of the Liberal Democrats at their most fecklessly opportunistic.
In fact, the most impressive sight last week was Charles Kennedy reshuffling his front bench to produce a team with a bracing tang of Gladstonian liberalism for the first time since Jo Grimond retired.
Vincent Cable and David Laws as Treasury spokesmen and Mark Oaten at the Home Office offer a go-ahead, market-oriented approach that might be quite attractive to Tories in places such as Dorset and Maidenhead.
The brutal question is: if all three parties are now positioning themselves a fraction to the right of what used to be the centre, how many people are likely to prefer the IDS version? Under the party??s arcane system for electing their leader, Conservative MPs found themselves landed with a leader for whom fewer than a third of their number had actually voted ?? 54 out of 166. The deciding voice of the constituencies went six to four for IDS only because they couldn??t stomach Clarke??s views on Europe.
The irony today is that, by successfully neutralising the European issue, Duncan Smith has removed the sole reason for his election and uncovered his otherwise uncertain legitimacy. To trigger a vote of confidence this autumn would at least rectify that. If IDS survived, he would have on record the support of a clear majority of his MPs.
If he didn??t survive, who should succeed him? Defenders of the status quo protest that there is no consensus. But then there never has been, at least not in the 50 years since Anthony Eden took over as Winston Churchill??s anointed heir.
What precipitates a contest is an overwhelming dissatisfaction with the incumbent and a feeling that almost anyone else would be better ?? in this case Michael Howard, David Davis, even Michael Portillo, in fact anyone but IDS.
We are rightly warned that the public does not warm to parties in turmoil. But as often as not the voters do respond with enthusiasm to a change of party leader. The Tories enjoyed quite a leap in the polls both after Thatcher supplanted Heath and after Major supplanted her, and both went on to win.
Against a demoralised Labour party and a shop-worn prime minister, it is surely worth a try.
