Iain Duncan Smith hit out at the media yesterday for giving him a "near death experience" in the run-up to his removal as Tory leader.

"You reach the stage where you can actually begin to read the newspapers with complete detachment as though you are reading about somebody else," he told the BBC Radio 4 Start the Week programme.

"Half the stories I was reading I just could not see myself described in them. There was this sense that I don't quite understand what it is all about."

The Chingford MP also compared his treatment to someone who "was supposed to have had some paedophile relationship or something".