WE SHALL OVERCOME

Andrew Lansley, the Tories' Mr Manifesto,

tells Anne McElvoy how William Hague

will win the next election

THE man with the plan does not, it turns out, have a plan at all — at least not one on the wall. I tell Andrew Lansley that he has been sold to me as 'the man with the Sasco wall-planner', doggedly plotting the Conservatives' progress towards electoral breakthrough. It's not about wall-planners any more,' he says, in the tone that a teenager adopts to tell you that your computer software's out of date. 'New Labour do it all on grids. They're obsessed by grids.' The Tories, he concedes, do it on grids too: 'just not as many as Labour, and, no, you can't see one.'

In his squeaky new office in Portcullis House, he is shirt-sleeved and relaxed, quietly handsome, a bit on the bulky side and effortlessly polite. Backbenchers mock him as `TFL' — The Future Leader — because he wears his ambitions in this direction so self-consciously. On the way to the interview, I meet another journalist and tell him I'm off to do Lansley. 'Who?' he says. 'You know, Andrew Lansley: nice Tory, coming thing, key figure in the Hague camp.' 'Never heard of him,' says my colleague.

Such is the position of a figure teasingly poised somewhere between obscurity and promise. The 'shadow Cabinet Secretary responsible for policy renewal' has risen sharply through what remain of the Conservative ranks to become the member of William Hague's election war council in charge of the manifesto, and an insistent rebutter, attacker, elaborator and quotemerchant. A bit of a Pooh-Bah, is Andrew. He has pronounced on the Peter Mandelson affair (calculatingly), on Liam Fox's antiabortion outburst (soothingly), on the number of government press officers (scathingly), on Michael 'Eight Houses' Meacher (ditto), on party donations (carefully), on the health service (frequently), and on the Dome (repeatedly). That was just in January.

The real point of him, a senior Tory strategist explained to me, is to be `the normal Tory on the telly'. And it's true that he has the all too rare quality in the present Conservative party of looking and sounding like an unobjectionable bloke with reasonable views, who just happened to wander into politics and turn Right.

After university — politics at Exeter — there was a stint as a civil servant at the DTI, promotion to PPS to Norman Tebbit, followed by three years in detox from Whitehall at the British Council. He went to Conservative Central Office as director of research in the first half of the Nineties, and finally became an MP in 1997, saturated in political experience before entering the House. He won his spurs with Hague by successfully running the Uxbridge by-election in July 1997, and got a further result as campaign co-ordinator for the European elections in 1999. A starring role in the general election was guaranteed.

When I first allude to the inevitability of a defeat, the tactical microchip is activated and Lansley says blankly, 'We're going to win.' As it happens, we have already played this particular game once at a lunch at which it took him the whole of the first course to admit that the Tories might just lose. Why do we have to do this again? It's so tiring. No one really thinks you're going to win, so why keep up the pretence? 'Well, the thing is to deserve to win. Last time we behaved as if we were bound to win. We were punished for that. We listened to what people said and now people are ready to listen to us again. I believe we can do it. I didn't become a politician to lose.'

All right, then. How much will you bet me that the Conservatives will win? 'You'll have to ask Stuart Wheeler [the Tories' super-generous donor, who got rich on the spread-betting business].' Strategy is what Lansley really likes talking about and there duly follows a lecture on how, after 1997, the party first tried to change its image before it had its values and policies sorted, but then realised that it had to be done the other way round.

I notice that he manages to take rather a lot of credit for the reinvention. A sense of self-sufficiency, bordering on the detached, surrounds him. He makes scant reference to shadow Cabinet colleagues and only a couple of glancing ones to William Hague throughout the conversation. 'Yep,' says a Central Office insider, 'he's the ultimate takeaway politician in a box. Andrew can deliver you the whole three courses — policy, strategy and the quotes to go with them. The only question is whether it is the right plan. It's very hard to divert him from one course of action once his mind is made up.'

But the advantage of this inflexibility is that Lansley lacks the sense of weary resignation that afflicts the rest of the senior Tories; their sense of embattlement, the constant expectation that they are about to be kicked. He'd be a happening Blairite if he weren't a Conservative. New Labour insiders recognise a budding class-act. On his own benches, there is a widespread desire to bring him down a peg or two. 'We call him the Mormon,' says a shadow Cabinet colleague. Why? 'You'll see. Spending time with Andrew is like being trapped on the doorstep by someone trying to teach you the Truth and with a big book to sell.' Unfair, horrid — but just a teeny bit true. He's a bit relentless when he gets going. You really do not want the full chapter and verse on exactly why tax cuts won't affect the public services; but I have the ten pages of notes if anyone is interested.

As it happens, he is religious; nothing as exotic as a Mormon, just straight-up liberal CofE and 'involved' in his church in Ascot. As what? A mild look of terror sweeps across his even features. 'Er, well, Sunday-school teacher, actually.' To judge by his hesitant embarrassment, this is obviously a painful admission for an MP these days — far worse than being caught snorting coke from the thighs of teenage transsexuals. Modern politics is brutally secular in its tastes.

Lansley, who is 44, is also the only senior Tory to be divorced. After 12 years, the decree nisi is on its way. His marriage to an Ascot GP foundered after he was elected to Westminster for Cambridgeshire South. He sees his three girls at weekends. This is a delicate matter for a party whose last remaining election lollipop will be the announcement recognising marriage in the tax system. With the government ill at ease endorsing marriage, the Tories intend to

restore recognition of the nuptial state in the tax system. 'I am in favour of marriage, even though my own has failed,' he says. 'It has a strengthening effect on society, It's a false dichotomy to say that only people with unblemished records should be able to support marriage. What you tax and don't tax sends a signal.' But he admits that he does not expect more people to marry as a result of a Tory pro-marriage policy. Isn't that supposed to be the point of it? 'Let's not get it out of proportion. Many people will still choose to cohabit, and they should not feel alienated from us because of it.'

If his bearing is emollient, his politics are not. He keeps calling New Labour 'socialist'. It's a word that most Tories these days, beyond the carnivorous old Right, have dropped as an attack. But then Lansley has worshipped at the Church of the Latter Day Tebbit and describes himself, unprompted, as a 'child of the Thatcher years'. In the competing forces around William Hague, he pulls strongly towards the more controversial choices and is a strong proponent of continuing to attack the government on asylum and crime. The 'bandwagon' accusation leaves him unbothered. 'Labour wouldn't attack us for jumping on bandwagons unless they feared that we were getting through. We just have to hold our nerve.'

In this mixture of soft gloss and hard undercoat, I glimpse the prototype of what may well become mainstream post-Blair Conservatism. One day all New Tones will be built this way. A form of blandness is an asset in politics and Lansley could be the PM's long-lost half-brother. He has a soft, sibilant voice — a touch camp, even, but not grating. His accent is Nowheresville: perfectly classless. In fact, he comes from Hornchurch. 'I'm the original Essex man before we called it that.' His mum featured in the opening shot of a television documentary about how Homchurch is the most ordinary place in Britain.

What does he dislike most about New Labour? 'They lie,' comes the sudden, impassioned reply. Whoa? This is an accusation most politicians avoid making off the cuff. Coming from Mr Normal, it sounds wildly extreme. But he does not back down. 'They have lied about our plans for the health service. When we say that we will match their spending, they say we'll cut it.' Does he consider Mr Blair personally to be a liar? 'I've heard him lie, yes; about our plans for the NHS and about the Lords voting down the hunting with hounds Bill when it hadn't even been put to the Lords at that point. It makes me angry that I know he has lied. Maybe he rationalises it, but it's still wrong.'

After the election — assuming that unthinkable Tory defeat — Lansley is ambitious for a meaty policy role. He's been circling Health hungrily for some time, to the discomfiture of the present incumbent, Liam Fox. The man with the plan has his own route ahead neatly mapped out. All he needs is a few more friends along the way.

Anne McEivoy is associate editor of the Independent.