The son of a single mother on a South London council estate, David Davis, 59, was never a typical Tory.

But his journey from Tooting via a grammar school education, business career with Tate & Lyle and the SAS territorials, to Westminster captured the romance of the work ethic so beloved of the Right.

Elected to the Commons in 1987, he first came to prominence in the party as a whip and was entrusted to push through the deeply unpopular Maastricht treaty in the dying days of John Major’s government.

He was a bruiser and made many enemies in the party who were to come back to haunt him years alter when he stood for the leadership.

“I didn’t want Maastricht either, but I didn’t want the Government to fall. I know I took no prisoners. But politics is a business where, frankly, you get enemies and I just have to live with that,” he told The Times when recalling those days.

But he was immensely loyal too to his political friends, sorting out problems colleagues had with their local parties or their personal life, and standing by those who lost their seats in the 1997 election as they attempted to re-establish their political careers.

After John Major's defeat, Mr Davis rejected a frontbench career prefering and instead took the post of chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, a position that traditionally goes to an opposition MP.

He threw himself into the job, publishing reports critical of the government on an almost weekly basis. His enemies said it gave him the perfect place to do the two things he loved most - showing off and plotting.

After the Tories' 2001 election defeat, he launched his first bid for the leadership. Although an outsider, he ran a good campaign, stressing his experience in government and his rightwing credentials. He was rewarded with the post of party chairman by Iain Duncan Smith.

His big chance came when Michael Howard resigned after the 2005 election. Mr Davis was clear frontrunner for the leadership. But Mr Howard, a backer of David Cameron, had other ideas.

Mr Howard spun out the leadership process for a full six months saying he wanted the rules to change. Really, he wanted to give Mr Cameron time to build his campaign and a following. It worked. The more Mr Cameron shone with his unscripted speeches and smooth campaigning, the more amateurish and unpolished Mr Davis looked. The campaign never shifted out of second gear, and he was trounced.

He was never going to be one of the Notting Hill set, preferring to get back to his Yorkshire constituency home at weekends. But in the early days of new his leadership, Mr Cameron came to an arrangement where Mr Davis would stay on as Shadow Home Secretary and retain total control over the brief.

Liberal by instinct, he passionately believed the extension to detention without trial was wrong. He would rant in private that he had never seen a shred of evidence that it was necessary to tackle the terrorist threat.

His confidence in strategy and tactics was buoyed by securing a string of ministerial scalps, including Charles Clarke and Beverley Hughes. Stong-minded and stubborn, he wouldn’t give an inch.

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