IN MY 'UMBLE OPINION

Alastair Campbell meets David Evans,

the man from the moral majority and backbench scourge of Back to Basics

DAVID EVANS was driving home late at night, fed up and friendless, miserable that his old pal Margaret Thatcher had not yet seen fit to make him a whip, frustrated that the media only ever contacted him about football, and wondering why he fought so hard for so long to get into the Commons. He turned on Radio 4 to listen

to Today In Parliament to be confronted by

the sound of 'some Tory plonker pontifi- catin". He then realised that the. Tory plonker was one David Evans. 'I couldn't believe it, this bloke sounding his aitches, crossing his Ts, dotting his Is. I didn't like what I heard.'

It dawned on him that for two years since entering the House as MP for Wel- wyn Hatfield in 1987 he had been living a lie. 'From that moment on, I decided to resurrect the real David Evans. I've enjoyed every minute since.' Shortly after- wards, the trade minister, Lord Hesketh, asked the post office worker's son to be his parliamentary private secretary. If Evans was an odd choice for Hesketh, he was an even odder choice for the Welsh Secretary, John Redwood, who snapped up the right- wing populist as soon as Hesketh was pro- moted to Chief Whip. Though Evans says he learned much from Redwood, who he clearly believes will go right to the top, he gives every impression of believing that the Secretary of State got the better part of the deal. False modesty is not one of Evans's faults.

'I did him a helluva lot of good. I mean he's well read, brilliant and all that, lots of brains, but it put a lot of people off. They thought they couldn't approach him. I got him mixing, got him to smile, made him more human. I brought him down to earth and he can talk to anyone now.'

Evans resigned as Redwood's PPS to win election to the executive of the 1922 Committee, which has given him a fresh platform from which to deliver his unashamedly right-wing views. Though not from Essex, he should have been, and as the officers of the 1922 see it as their job to speak publicly on party issues, they would be happier if a mere gentleman like Evans kept a lower profile. I fear they will be thwarted in their desires. He even has his own catchphrase in the Commons 'that lot opposite', the 't' in lot almost silent, which Messrs Skinner and Cryer shout along with him from Labour's hooli- gan bench.

It was Evans, who insists that if Back to Basics isn't a moral crusade 'then it bloody well ought to be', who shattered the fragile support that had been built to bolster Tim Yeo — 'Yo or Yay-oh or Yee-oh whatever

you wanna call 'im' — when the existence of the minister's love-child' was revealed. `He should have gone the moment he knew it was gonna come out,' he said, speaking, I think, of the story rather than the child.

`I got a call on my car phone from this radio bloke and I said what I imagined most people in the party were thinking he's got to go. I assumed I was probably about the thirty-first MP who'd said it. Then I get home and it's like war has bro- ken out. I couldn't believe I was the only one saying it. I've had eleven hundred let- ters and only four against me — one from a lesbian, one from a homosexual, and two from vicars who objected because I said there was a difference between . doing something and getting caught. Yet our leaders were saying things which I couldn't believe, they were so out of touch.'

Cars seem to play an important part in his life. We met in the members' lobby and he suggested we went to his Mercedes automatic, parked in a place where it shouldn't have been in the underground carpark. He is coy about his wealth, largely made from a cleaning company which he built up from scratch and sold for £36 mil- lion three weeks after being selected for Welwyn Hatfield in 1986. He intended to concentrate full-time on politics, but during those two 'disastrous, pissed off' early years as an MP he embarked on several new business ventures in cleaning, insurance and property which keep the money rolling in. A millionaire? 'Oh yeah.' Multi? Dunno — what's multi mean?' More than one, I suppose. 'Oh yeah.'

We had a similar verbal tussle over the question most of the Tory MPs I had asked about 58-year-old Evans, married to Janice for 38 years, wanted me to put to him — in the words of a whip, 'Has the man from the moral majority ever had an illicit leg-over?'

'Oh come off it, I can't answer that?' Why not? 'Janice don't wanna read about that kind of thing.' You've been lecturing others about it. Yes or no? 'You don't need to write about that.' I do. Yes or no? `No! Never!' There was not the slightest wobble in his eyes.

`You can tell all your mates they can fol- low me for the rest of my life — there is nothing in my locker. Private Eye tried to get me and they couldn't because I'm the most boring bloke of all. There's no flats, no bankruptcies, I'm not a homosexual, I do love my wife, and if there's one person who can take to the moral high ground, it's David Evans.'

He believes in absolutes and states with conviction whatever it is that he is stating. `I'm right-wing. I'm a hanger and flogger, I believe in balancing the books, corporal punishment, tough sentences, weeding out social security fraud, tougher immigration controls, providing for your own pension and health. The prosperity of the nation should only look after those who clearly cannot afford their own health care or ben- efits or whatnot.'

It is a highly Thatcherite agenda, yet part of the Evans philosophy is unquestioning loyalty to the party leader, so long as that leader is in place, though again you sense he is going through the motions when he says of John Major, 'He is every bit as good as Mrs T.' It is only through talking to other MPs that you learn Evans is deeply worried about the Prime Minister's prospects. 'I support the leader, whatever he does, while he is there. You can give advice, but you don't vote against. You can talk straight, but you don't cause trouble.' Leaving Major alone, he goes for those around him. 'Fowler — never rated him. Ryder — dunno. Sarah Hogg — I wouldn't know her if she was sat next to me, but I see some of the stuff coming out of Down- ing Street and it makes people gasp. It's crap.'

The Back to Basics debacle is the most graphic and politically damaging example of the syndrome Evans describes. 'When he came out with Back to Basics, I thought, "Brilliant, we've hit a bull's-eye." It was just what our people wanted to hear. They did want moral values. They were fed up with single parents and kids getting away with crime. They did want ID cards. They did want to see scroungers sorted out. And they were talking about family values.

`Our people do believe that adultery is wrong. The fact that every bugger does it is neither here nor there. Then the Yeo thing happens and they hear their leaders defending it. Once you start defending adultery, you're in the mire. It's wrong. That goes for anyone, but the higher up you are, the more it applies. In public office, you need people that my children and their children can look up to. That goes for headmasters, chief constables, and it certainly goes for ministers. When you're talking about prime ministers and the sovereign's son — they're in a different league.'

It was Evans's abilities in the field of straight talking that got him on to the first rung of the parliamentary ladder after Years of trying but failing to get on to the candidates' list. 'David Evans, ex-profes- sional footballer, left school at 15, educa- tion zero, scrubs floors. I wasn't what they wanted. The Conservative Party wasn't ready for me. I'm not sure it is now, to be honest.'

In 1978, he was interviewed by Sir Mar- cus Fox who had been asked by Mrs Thatcher to find what Evans, again shun- ning modesty, calls 'people who'd actually done something' to join the candidates' list. Evans admitted he couldn't spell, add up, or name more than five kings or queens, but he was convinced he could communicate. 'I told him that without the working-class vote they could be as clever as they liked but they weren't gonna form a government, and Marcus said, "Brilliant, let's go down the pub."' He came close to getting selected for mid-Bedfordshire in 1982, when a three- way tie resulted in a re-run, into which Nicholas, Lye11 was parachuted from a less safe seat late in the day. 'And they said there was no carpet-bagging. He beat me 52-48. I was well pissed off, because as far as I was concerned I'd won it, till the party machine took over. I got onto Cecil Parkinson and told him what I thought of the whole lot of them. That was it. I thought, "Right, they don't want me, fine, that's it. I give up."' He concentrated on business, convinced his political career would mirror his sport- ing career with Aston Villa and Warwick- shire — he never made it to the first team of either — and that the closest he would get to a seat in Parliament was the toilet seats his Brengreen company cleaned from 1981. That was a big year for Evans. His company won the contract for the priva- tised refuse collection in Southend, one of the early privatisation tussles with Labour and the unions. 'Had we been beaten, I don't think that what has happened would have happened. But we kept our nerve, Mrs T kept hers and the rest followed on.'

When he was asked by conference fixers to follow Ted Heath's savaging of Mrs Thatcher at the party conference, he hesi- tated, unsure he could carry it off, but won them over with a speech which began: `With all due respect to the previous speaker, I only empty dustbins in Southend.' Heath couldn't stomach the populist rabble-rouse that followed, com- plete with a call to privatise all hospitals, and walked off, leaving Evans to plead with Thatcher, 'Tell the people what the plan is. Trust them.'

He would give the same advice to John Major now, though clearly he fears that there isn't a plan, just a jumble of ideas half-baked by the kitchen cabinet. He wants Major to `go back to basics as it was first understood by the party, morality, right and wrong, undiluted.

'I mean, he's our natural leader and I think his name is on Back to Basics. He's got to stand up and defend it and tell his colleagues not to test his loyalty too far again. You see him one-to-one and you remember why he's our leader, why he won the election for us, because he's in touch with the grassroots. Then you hear some of his speeches and you see that someone's got to him. It's not him. He should go back to being himself,' he says. The words 'like what I did' remain unsaid.

Alastair Campbell is assistant editor (poli- tics) of Today newspaper.