IT is pantomime season, so it’s time to pick the politician most deserving of your festive boos, hisses and catcalls.

My villain is someone who boasts of transforming our complex benefits system to “make work pay”, but who has overseen a car-crash of expensive bungling and delay.

His CV also includes the bedroom tax and botched new disability benefits, both of which are causing huge suffering to the most vulnerable people.

And, when confronted with evidence that his policies have sparked an epidemic of hunger, he stuck two fingers up to the Archbishop of Canterbury and others most worried about it.

Not only that, when challenged, he delivered the most outrageous porky to try to disguise his lack of action on food banks…a blatant untruth.

Yes, my pantomime villain is Iain Duncan Smith who, incredibly, is still in his job after nearly five years of this dismal, disastrous record.

The car-crash is the non-introduction of Universal Credit, where Mr Duncan Smith ignored repeated warnings that quickly merging six means-tested benefits would go horribly wrong

Sure enough, instead of one million people receiving UC as planned, there are a few trials in Northern jobcentres and tens of millions of pounds has been written off in failed IT.

The bedroom tax debacle is well-known, with countless families plunged into rent arrears, and the new personal independence payment (PIP) is a similar mess, with six-month delays.

But what really gives the Work and Pensions Secretary the award is his disgraceful reaction to the scandal of widening hunger.

The Archbishop put his name to an alarming study which exposed the extraordinary numbers being fed by food banks – including more than 40,000 people in the North-East.

It pinpointed the policies of the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) – the long delays before benefits are paid and their harsh removal, often for “bewildering” reasons.

Like all organisations named, the DWP was told to respond and attend the report’s launch….but, uniquely, it boycotted the event and has still not responded formally.

It was quickly clear there would be no change to benefit sanctions and Mr Duncan Smith accused MPs who raised the issue of talking “the same old rubbish”.

Then he denied he had refused to meet the Trussell Trust, which runs most food banks, when – just hours earlier – it had told me, sadly, that he had. For 18 months!

I think this matters, because it laid bare not only Mr Duncan Smith’s refusal to listen to arguments that clash with his own, but his willingness to brazenly fib to MPs about it.

Why is he still in his job? It’s a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie when – according to a book by a Tory journalist - the Chancellor privately believes he is “just not clever enough”.

David Cameron has twice tried to shift him, but backed down when Mr Duncan Smith refused to go – presumably in deference to a former party leader?

Meanwhile, one independent forecast is that an extra 400,000 children will be plunged into poverty by 2016 and 900,000 by 2021.

The Work and Pensions Secretary “discovered” poverty on a trip to a rough Glasgow housing estate, in 2002 – yet almost everything he has done since is increasing it.

Is it too much to hope he will soon leave the stage?