A self-made millionaire businessman of the “Where there’s muck there’s brass” school, David Evans built up an office and street cleaning business, before selling it in 1986 and being elected the following year as Conservative for Welwyn Hatfield, a constituency he represented until he was ejected from Parliament in the Labour landslide of 1997.

A studiedly working-class Tory, born in Edmonton, London, and inhabiting the far right of his party, even on his own benches he was to become known as “the Beast of Welwyn”. But he revelled in his barrow-boy credentials, and liked to express himself in a language whose plainness bordered on brutality.

This, however, did him no disservice with Tories of very different background and origins, for whom he appeared on his arrival in Parliament to have some sort of “hotline” to those parts of working-class Britain whose loyalty was perceived as being vital to Conservatism’s continuing electoral success. Thus in his season he was appreciated by such figures of very different kidney as John Redwood (for whom he was Parliamentary Private Secretary) and Michael Portillo, though there was always the suspicion among seasoned observers that he was merely their “pet prole”.

It was said of him by some of his parliamentary colleagues that he appeared, ideally for the role he seemed to want to play, to combine the pugnacity of Norman Tebbit with the foul mouth of Alf Garnett. But in truth he did not have Tebbit’s brains, and nor was his language half as decorative as Alf Garnett’s. And his electoral downfall in 1997, ascribable not just to the political sea change of that time but to some outrageously racist, and otherwise socially offensive (notably, anti-homosexual) remarks he had made to the sixth formers of a local school, was clear proof that his finger was not in fact on the pulse of popular feeling in the way that his more gullible admirers (and possibly himself) believed it to be.

For his part he was an absolutely unqualified admirer of the party leader Margaret Thatcher for whom he spearheaded a campaign to stamp out football hooliganism. To him is ascribed the notion of identity cards which he strenuously recommended to her. As a former professional footballer himself, and as chairman of Luton Town FC, 1984-89, he might well have been considered to be talking common sense informed by inside knowledge. But it was of a piece with his general notions on the necessity of having a well-disciplined society, and in the social mores of the 1980s it was possible for him to express them in such simplistic terms as: “I’m a very right-wing disciplinarian; I don’t trust the Russians; the more nuclear weapons the better.”

David John Evans was born the son of a Post Office employee in Edmonton in 1935 and educated at Raglan School, Enfield. He failed his 11-plus and completed his education at Tottenham Technical College.

As a youngster he had showed considerable promise as both a cricketer and footballer, and he played cricket for Gloucestershire and Warwickshire, though without making any first team appearances. He played football for Aston Villa, though likewise, without first-team representation. In 1960 he founded his own firm, Exclusive Office Cleaning, which later became Brengreen Holdings. The privatisation of local authority cleaning services provided him with a great opportunity. His company won the contract for refuse collection and street cleaning services for Southend-on-Sea Borough Council, and over the next 25 years he built up a business which he was able to sell for more than £30 million in 1986.

In the meantime he had been keen to get into politics. In 1968 he joined the Conservative Party and almost immediately set about trying to become a prospective parliamentary candidate. His efforts met with no success, a process on which his verdict was: “Under Heath the Tories were all stockbrokers and landed gentry; I didn’t have the right accent.” He therefore had for the moment to restrict his ambitions to a career in local politics, becoming Wheathampstead ward election director in 1976. This paved the way to election to Wheathampstead Parish Council in May 1979, and to St Albans District Council the following year.

In May 1986 he got his chance for Parliament when the sitting Conservative MP at Welwyn Hatfield was told he had lost the confidence of the constituency association. In a predominantly middle-class constituency comprising a garden city and two new towns, with a third of its local authority housing owner occupied, he had no difficulty in holding on to a comfortable Tory majority at the general election of 1987, and repeating that performance in 1992.

His outspokenness in Parliament (on the European Commission: “Get stuffed”; on murderers: “Hang the lot”; on football hooligans: “Give ‘em scars for the rest of their lives”) was always certain to guarantee for him a back-bench career, but in that sphere his membership of the executive of the powerful backbench 1922 Committee gave him a cast-iron immunity from attack.

It took a descent to personal insult during the election campaign of 1997, in an address to sixth formers in which he called his Labour opponent in Welwyn Hatfield, a “single girl” with “three bastard children”, to which he added general insults on blacks and homosexuals, to demonstrate to the world a willingness on his part to embrace and broadcast uncivilised opinions in a totally inappropriate context to a potentially highly susceptible audience. In the general election of May 1 that year, Melanie Johnson romped to victory by the kind of majority that the Tories had been accustomed to thinking of theirs by right.

The following year Evans apologised in the High Court to the Birmingham Six (wrongfully convicted in 1975 of the murder of 21 people), after having claimed in an interview that they were guilty, even though they had been cleared by the Court of Appeal.

Returning to his business interests after leaving Parliament, Evans continued as chairman of his hygiene and cleaning services company, Broadreach Group, until 2002. Evans married, in 1956, Janice Masters. They had two sons and a daughter.

David Evans, businessman and MP for Welwyn Hatfield, 1987-97, was born on April 23, 1935. He died on October 22, 2008, aged 73