HOWARD FLIGHT is reputedly the second richest MP (after Labour’s Fiona Mactaggart). A popular figure in Parliament and the City, where he has worked as a investment manager for many years, he has spearheaded the Tory attempt to woo City backing in the run-up to polling day.

He has been instrumental in setting up the James review on Whitehall waste, which underpins the Tories’ election pledge of tax cuts and scrapping bureaucracy.

Married with four children, the workaholic Mr Flight has confessed to putting in a 90-hour week in order to fulfil up to 16 directorships, while still discharging his duties as an MP.

The member for Arundel & South Downs since 1997, he is known as one of the more thoughtful right-wingers in the party and describes himself as an “Essex man” who embraced enterprise at an early age — he made his pocket money by growing water cress and selling it at a Women’s Institute stall.

Mr Flight has fulfilled his ambition to make money, but his big political ambitions, including a hope to be Chancellor one day, will almost certainly have been thwarted by his latest indiscretion.

His tendency to speak his mind has landed him in trouble before. Three years ago, when he was Shadow Chief Secretary, he estimated that some public spending could be slashed by 20 per cent.

He survived that. But his latest remarks about more spending and tax cuts were unfortunately made in the febrile atmosphere of a pre-election campaign when slips are not so easily forgiven. Mr Flight, 56, encountered politics at an early age, through his grandfather who was a rampant socialist.

“I would argue furiously with him. I thought it was all rubbish from an early age,” he has recalled.

He first held political office at 16 when he was the vice chairman of the Little Waltham Young Conservatives.

Educated at Brentwood School in Essex, Cambridge and Michigan University, he had a long career in the City before finally arriving in Parliament in 1997.

In the City he took over the investment arm of Guinness Mahon to form Guinness Flight. When the South Africa group Investec bought out the business in 1998 he became a multimillionaire.

The year he arrived in the Commons he backed two of the losers for the Tory leadership — John Redwood, then Kenneth Clarke in the final round. William Hague was the eventual winner.

Other unpopular causes he has supported include the pensions industry after the mis-selling scandal, accusing the establishment of “snobbishness” towards financial advisers.

He has always been proud to be different. His pinstripe suits and braces are too posh for Parliamentary tastes these days, and in an age when smokers are virtually ostricised, he still clings to his 40-a-day habit.

THE SPEECH

‘Michael [Howard] has said the unthinkable. All those politically correct things you couldn’t say — if you said a word about asylum or immigration were “racialist”, if you said a word about travellers you were absolutely wicked. All the things that common sense Middle England knows are a load of crap, and no one dares speak out — he’s spoken out! What more do you want! That’s how you win elections, and it’s then about what you do economically when you’ve got there.’

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