Affable though his public persona is, David Davis is a demanding man, and as his black Merc tears from Newmarket to Norwich, what he demands with most urgency is food. At moments like these — 6pm on a November evening on the Tory campaign trail — it seems that only a McDonald’s will do. When we find one, Davis is on the phone, so I do the honours and buy him a quarter pounder with cheese and a Coke.
“Where’s my carbohydrates?” he asks, indignant, when he joins us. “I need chips. I need a Flurry.” And so it is I who returns to the counter to order a Crunchie McFlurry for the man who would be our next Conservative prime minister.
Davis’s campaign runs on saturated fat and white sugar worked off by adrenalin. He accuses his opponent, David Cameron, of being preoccupied by image, but what strikes me in my 11 hours with him is the strength of his self-image as a machismo politician. His metaphors are martial or pugilistic: archaeology tells him that in battle most soldiers are arrowed in the back, fleeing before the enemy; Tony Blair is a terrible Prime Minister but “a brilliant political general”. The man whose extra-retroussé nose was broken four times in his youth, refers to his “fighting weight”, an athletic 12.5 st (79kg).
“Alastair Campbell is an alpha male,” he announces, gnawing at his burger. Is that what he is? “Broadly speaking, yes. But these things are very complex. You see, Tony Blair isn’t. He’s almost camp, isn’t he?” And he segues into a discussion of group dynamics, although no lecture could compete with the practical demonstration I witness today as he teases, coerces and somehow inspires his staff.
The day starts for us all on the 08.14 from Liverpool Street to Billericay, Essex, where he is tutored on local issues by John Baron, the constituency MP. By 9am he is regurgita- ting details of the local business rate to a group of shopkeepers in Billericay High Street. Then, inside a creosoted barn behind the Rising Sun pub, Davis delivers The Speech, the no-notes address he has devised for the campaign trail.
“I am a low tax bore. That should go down well in Essex,” he says, and it does. The 120 greying Tories also approve his time-to-wield-a-handbag rhetoric on Europe, his praise for Margaret Thatcher and his insistence that he, like her, is a principled leader. As he leaves a woman declares: “He’ll have changed a few minds this morning.”
In Newmarket Conservative Club at lunchtime, The Speech goes down a little less well, something for which he blames the glaring lights — and, therefore, his aides — rather than the sophistication of his audience. But he is still glowing from his bettering of Cameron on Question Time the previous week. “An 18-point shift in the polls in 48 hours is not a bad move and it’s the beginning of a ripple,” he says when we finally sit down to talk.
Now he is facing Cameron rather than Ken Clarke, has his age, 56, become an issue? “No, don’t think so. There’s a certain media sense of ‘David Cameron’s young’. Well, yeah, he’s thirtysomething. I’m fiftysomething. That’s a pretty normal age for a politician in this sort of game. It’s not as though I’m decrepit. If we wanted to decide this by a ten-mile run, I’d be the quicker.”
Nevertheless, if as Tory leader he lost in 2009 (as Michael Portillo, for instance, believes the Conservatives are doomed to) by 2013 he would be 64. “I’m not too sure I’d want two runs. We’ll see. I think, firstly, I’ll win and if I don’t I’ll get so bloody close it’s hung parliament territory. In which case, let’s finish the fight. I don’t think about the other options. Those two for me fill most of the probability sphere. You know what I mean by that?”
Perhaps not fully, but I enjoy the jargon. Davis talks in thriller titles: The Probability Sphere, Judgment Call, The Ultimate Grand Vizier (a reference to his chairing the Public Accounts Committee) — and The Gethsemane Moment when his lead evaporated after his underwhelming speech at the Blackpool Tory conference, although some say the press had decided that “Davis bombs” would be the headline even before he stood up. “But that doesn’t matter. That was the operational outcome. It’s like a general saying, ‘I would have won if it hadn’t rained.’ It did rain. No, Blackpool was a management failure on my part. We just did too much and the speech got completed the day before when it should have been completed weeks before. I didn’t know it properly.”
In some weird way, I tell him, I get the impression he relished the setback. It makes him the underdog. “Something like that. I like fights. I don’t like cruises.” He pauses; “fights”, he thinks, might sound too aggressive.
It is the day before Blair’s defeat on the 90-day detention terrorism vote, and the Shadow Home Secretary, while hurtling round East Anglia for votes, must prepare a major speech in the Commons. Also scheduled is Woman’s Hour and a grilling by Jeremy Paxman. It is as well that his car is a mobile situation room. It has, obviously, satellite navigation, but Davis also owns a £700 device from Tottenham Court Road that gives his phone a high-speed internet connection. I remember running into him on a train a few years ago and being shown its predecessor and his new “tablet” laptop. To complete the techno-brat image, he was reading a fat sci-fi novel with a title along the lines of “Time Warriors from the 37th Century” (although I may be gilding the lily a little here). Anyway, as they used to say of the Six Million Dollar Man, he has the technology.
There is, however, the human factor. “Tomorrow,” he complains down the super-phone to base, “is turning into the day from hell courtesy of some messing up”, and Ramesh Chhabra, his press aide, shrinks a little beside me on the back seat. “Remind me, Mesh,” he says, “to give you a lesson on television management.” The consensus is that Davis is a nice man, a great leader, but a horrible boss. Yet they come back for more. Chhabra, who was once his intern, quit Central Office to join Davis’s campaign.
