Chris Grayling is David Cameron’s “attack dog”. If a minister is in trouble over expenses, or a Labour MP is facing questions over a business deal, word goes out from Notting Hill: “Off with the muzzle.” By day he is the Conservatives’ Work and Pensions spokesman, by night he has a roving role to savage Gordon Brown. When we asked what kind of dog he was he replied “rottweiler”, although he admitted: “I’d rather own a terrier”, which is in fact what he is like — tenacious, energetic and difficult to slap down.

He has been compared to Norman Tebbit. “We have similar hair,” he told us. “I am not an untrained polecat but David Cameron’s role is to set out a positive vision and someone has to get stuck in to holding the Government to account.”

Like Lord Tebbit, he is more estate agent than estate owner. He didn’t go to Eton but he wears (non-iron) Eton shirts. He doesn’t have nannies; his wife works as his constituency secretary back in Epsom near the family home and looks after their two children. “I wouldn’t go to Notting Hill dinner parties,” he said. “I have an old council flat near Victoria station. The bathroom used to leak and the wiring in the kitchen once gave me an electric shock. There is an image that all the people in the Shadow Cabinet come from the same background, which isn’t true.”

The grammar school boy who grew up in suburban Buckinghamshire and became a management consultant is useful to his leader because he can reach a different audience: Top Gear rather than top hat. “I am more Middle England. I don’t go shooting or belong to a smart London club. My club is Manchester United FC.” Although he calls the Conservative leader David, not Dave, he has been accepted into Mr Cameron’s trusted inner sanctum.

As the Tories gather in Birmingham for their annual conference, Mr Grayling says that they must beware of being too confident about the opinion polls. “David Cameron read us the riot act on the complacency issue at the Shadow Cabinet meeting this week, He made it absolutely clear that we would be crazy if we thought the next election was in the bag. Labour may be having a bad time but we’ve still got a lot of work to do to earn people’s trust.”

The opening session of the conference celebrating the year’s victories has been scrapped. “The decision was taken that we shouldn’t stand around on the stage saying ‘hurrah’. I don’t think anyone has issued a blanket ban on champagne but we have got to avoid looking celebratory. We will be wearing ties, the set is not ostentatious, the conference message is measured. We are not going to go over the top in attacking the Government. These are serious times and a serious week.” The Conservatives are treading cautiously on the economy. Their attack dog is happy to brand the downturn a “Gordon Brown Bust” but he does not want to get his teeth into the super-rich.

“There is no doubt that the gap between the rich and the poor is very wide but the way you narrow it is by bringing people up rather than bringing people down. You don’t make society more prosperous by chopping the legs off its wealth creators.”

In his view it would be wrong to condemn bankers as greedy. “The nature of a capitalist economy is that people build wealth for themselves and spread it.”

He won’t rail against the hedge fund boys, some of whom are his friends. The short-sellers should not be pilloried even if they create victims. “Taking a punt has been here since the first markets emerged thousands of years ago, there is nothing unusual about this. In any economic downturn there are people who sadly lose out, and that is something we should be concerned about.”

It would, he believes, be a mistake to rush through more regulation on the back of the current crisis. “It’s very easy when things are bad to say ‘This is all wrong, we should regulate’, but the State and politicians can only deliver part of the solution.”

His party has been courting the trade unions but Mr Grayling wants to roll back the State on workers’ rights. “There’s a real worry that in difficult times employers will be reluctant to take people on because they’ve got economic uncertainty and all the difficulties of employment law. Companies are scared, they feel it’s too easy for people to take advantage of them by threatening tribunals. There are many aspects of employment law where we could and should be reducing the burden on business.”

Maternity rights have, in his view, gone far enough — and he thinks that Sir Alan Sugar highlighted a genuine concern when he suggested that businesses might be put off hiring women by the new laws. “I have no doubt that some employers don’t employ [women] because of that anxiety but I don’t think that should be the case,” he said. He is also planning an overhaul of health and safety legislation. “The law is interpreted in a ludicrous way — you can’t use conkers in the playground or you can’t use a ladder — and a simpler, regime would make it harder for people to make these stupid decisions.”

One of Mr Cameron’s most controversial themes is the suggestion that Britain is broken. Critics condemn it as unpatriotic, but Mr Grayling is a strong supporter of the “broken society” idea. “There are great things about the country but if I sit with teenagers in any city and ask how long it would take them to get a gun they always say five minutes. That is symptomatic of a society that is getting things badly wrong.”

Parents are failing to teach their children the basics. “Holding a knife and fork, knowing how to string a sentence together. A courteous society is a good society,” he said. “But there is more to it than that. An absence of male role models, failure at school, addiction, long-term benefit dependency have created an environment where people don’t know how to make anything of their lives.” He is angry that celebrities such as George Michael and Amy Winehouse go unpunished for taking drugs and he thinks that footballers should try harder to be good. “Some of the examples set by people with a high profile are very damaging. It sends the wrong message; the law shouldn’t be soft on them.”

Violent films are in his view damaging. “We should send the message to the licensing authorities that we don’t want more and more to be acceptable. It is violence rather than sex that is the big issue: we don’t want to create a sense of normality about gun crime and knife crime.” And he thinks that reality TV shows are doing nothing to mend the broken society. “Big Brother’s not a great showpiece.”

Like the Tory leader, Mr Grayling is convinced that more should be done to support marriage. “It is clearly better to be brought up by a mum and dad. Marriage is a good thing, children brought up by a married couple tend to do better. We should champion the institution of marriage but we shouldn’t be judgmental of those who don’t get married.”

His proposals for welfare reform appear to have been adopted wholesale by the Government. Like James Purnell, Mr Grayling wants long-term benefit claimants to do community work, and insists that those who refuse to take a job should lose state support. He refuses to use the phrase “benefit scrounger” because he says that the real problem for most claimants is lack of confidence. “There are millions of people out there who could make more of their lives if we grab them by the scruff of the neck and say, ‘Here’s some help’. But they have to do their bit.”

This is the bottom line for the new Tories: people are responsible for their own lives, including, as Mr Cameron famously said over the summer, those who are poor or fat. Mr Grayling does not want to go on the attack against fatties – “I’m trying to lose my own summer bulge” – but he agrees with the principles set out by his leader. “The support the State provides has got to be a two-way process,” he explained. “If people are brought up in difficult circumstances it may not be easy but they cannot just abdicate all responsibility for the situation they are in. We will help them get back on to the straight and narrow but they can’t just say ‘It’s nothing to do with me’. ” People who refuse to co-operate with his welfare programme would, be stripped of their benefits.

When we ask whether he would be happy for somebody to end up living on the streets, he said that it would be their choice. “They have a responsibility to take part. It would be incomprehensible that somebody would refuse to take part in a programme that gives them help and choose to live on the streets instead.”

Lord Tebbit would be proud. It’s “on your bike” for the 21st century, only Mr Grayling says that he prefers to catch the bus.

Grammar school boy

Born 1 April, 1962

Education Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

Career Joined BBC as trainee in 1985 and later became a producer, worked for Channel 4 and became a management consultant in 1997

Political career Elected MP for Epsom and Ewell in 2001. He joined the front bench in 2003 as health spokesman and was Shadow Leader of the House and transport spokesman before being appointed Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary last year

Family Married with two children

Quickfire

Sarah Palin or Sarah Brown? Sarah Palin

Eton School or Eton shirts? Eton shirts because they’re noniron

Turnips or truffles? Truffles if you mean the chocolate kind

Polenta or pies? Pies

Bike or bus? Bus

Richard Curtis or Mike Leigh? Richard Curtis

Top Gear or The Good Life? Top Gear

Rottweiler or terrier? Rottweiler

Times Recommends

• The bright side of this winter rain
• Story behind the picture: Snow Leopard, 2008
• Times Charity Appeal: The Place2Be