After Thatcher toppled him, his incapacity to do or say the right thing verged on high comedy.
The cuts proposed by officials at the Department for Work and Pensions include abolishing statutory maternity pay and barring under-25s from claiming incapacity benefit or housing benefit.
An inquest found last month that Harris, 53, of Bristol, who was partially sighted, took her own life after months of constant pain and following a "fit for work" ruling that replaced her incapacity benefit with jobseeker's allowance.
A document dated in late July said the disability minister discussed possible changes to incapacity benefits and gave a clear steer to civil servants on the importance of freezing or uprating benefit rates below inflation as a way of controlling costs.
Barring under-25s from claiming incapacity benefit or housing benefit.
Or love of the language and its literature (and, if so, is that devalued by a more internationalist attitude to art forms that don't bump up against the English incapacity to speak foreign languages)?
Atos Healthcare tests around 11,000 incapacity benefit claimants a week, using the work capability assessment.
As I've written before, it was he who began righting the Thatcher-era wrong of pushing people on to incapacity benefit to shorten the official unemployment rolls.
Recent Tory claims that they have a strong track record on cutting social security over the past five years are undermined by the documents, which point out that coalition changes failed to meet promises to limit spending on three of the costliest cap items: incapacity benefit, disability benefit and housing benefit.
Reform the controversial work capability assessment "fit for work" test for ill and disabled people on incapacity benefit.
Every supposed coup is now explained by a leader's minor orthopaedic problem, and, when rumours swirl around the reasons for that leader's incapacity, malcontents take to Twitter rather than to the streets.
