Shadow boxer

I was in his office in the House of Commons last week when the timing of John Prescott's announcement on "modernising" the right of council tenants to buy their homes at a discount was confirmed. He met the news with a broad grin. For Davis and his Conservative colleagues, it feels like a bright spot amid the encircling gloom of Iain Duncan Smith's party leadership – a touchy subject on which, of course, Davis will not speak a word out of place.

It's not just the scale of public support for extending the right to buy that leads Tories to see it as a potential vote-winner. Davis says his scheme to extend the right to housing association tenants would increase investment in new build and so provide homes for the burgeoning numbers of people languishing in bed and breakfast hotels. With all the authority of a former chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, the ultimate source of probity, he lays out numbers that show a net increase of 33% in the social rented stock – as many as 30,000 new homes per year, compared with the 22,000 in Housing Corporation plans.

It's controversial stuff, yes, but no one can say these calculations come from a backbench chancer. In what is, admittedly, a somewhat shrunken jungle, Davis is a very big beast indeed.

A eurosceptic who took the toughest of stands on that recent touchstone issue, gay adoption, Davis is – let's get the "T" word out straight away – a Thatcherite. Now aged 54, he entered the House of Commons in 1987 – when Margaret Thatcher was at the height of her power – after a business career with Tate & Lyle, an exemplary pro-Tory company that successfully led an anti-nationalisation fight against Labour in the 1940s. To Davis, now as then, Thatcher was a visionary. She imagined a Britain freer and less bureaucratic, with enterprise rewarded and monolithic council estates broken up.

Davis, too, wants a Britain where government encumbrances no longer stop people moving onwards and upwards to find their destiny. His political credo is punctuated by references to mobility, but that does not necessarily mean geographical movement. He takes as his example the south London council estate on which his family lived when he was a child: nice enough for large numbers of socially mobile tenants who wanted to stay put after exercising the right to buy given to them by Lady T.

"She established a sense of direction, then proceeded to move there in steps," says Davis. "On union reform, privatisation and sorting out the national accounts, progress was incremental." These days that's being interpreted as caution. So why not, I ask, really go for it on the right to buy?

Why not accept the logic of those polls saying at least four-fifths of council and housing association tenants would like to become owner-occupiers and, one way or another, let them have their houses and flats?

His response invokes the name of Keith Joseph, the Thatcher-era minister and architect of many of the free-market policies that characterised the time ("Great ideas, but Keith did not accomplish much").

Yes, four-fifths of housing association and council tenants want to own their own home – but each year only 3% exercise the option

Let's start by extending the right to buy, then see, says Davis. "You want me to be like the man who emerged dripping from having swum the Channel, only to start swimming the Atlantic. Instead, let's follow the natural rate of purchase. Yes, four-fifths want to own their own home, but each year only 3% exercise the option."

Provocation and practicality
As chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Davis became something of a bugbear to housing associations. "I had a spat with the Housing Corporation over its stewardship. All I wanted to do was open out the RSLs a bit – we had been provoked by uncovering major fraud, after all." And now, he accepts, the first reaction of social housing bodies to him tends to be negative. But he is a charmer and claims dialogue with the sector is never slow in coming.

That might be because he eschews, as he puts it, "overarching concepts". Political correspondents, who are prone to over-use convenient metaphors, divide Tories into the "Doc Marten tendency" – the old guard – and the "Russell & Bromley group" – remember party chairman Theresa May's conference footwear – and Davis is squarely in the former camp. But, in line with the Tory party's desire to focus on immediate practicalities and, temporarily, at least, not talk philosophy, he won't be drawn on "theoretical issues" – such as, didn't his statement at the Tory party conference on extending the right to buy amount to a sort of nationalisation of registered social landlords, some of which think of themselves very much as autonomous social enterprises rather than public bodies? And didn't his attitude at the Public Accounts Committee indicate he believes RSLs do belong within the ambit of the state?

Look, he says, the real question is the housing stock. Are we seeking to expand the stock or rather housing availability? They are not the same. The state has invested £24bn in social housing; it is entitled to dispose of it. His plan, he claims, will bump up total supply. Private lending to RSLs won't be affected, he says firmly, getting out pen and pad to demonstrate the numbers underpinning his claims.

When I probe him on Tory thinking about the "new localism" and the future role of local authorities, the reaction is the same avoidance of overarching philosophical pronouncement. He chairs a shadow cabinet committee on what to do about councils and – surprise – its deliberations turn out to be far from over. With a nod and wink he indicates we should not hold our breath, while saying "I guarantee the outcome will not be tidy".

Davis will certainly make a professional job of shadowing Prescott. Over the firefighters' dispute he has begun, if you will excuse the pun, to warm up. Yet, for all his enthusiasm about having a saleable and relatively clear-cut policy in the right to buy, Davis may not be long for the task. His answer to the question of whether he would like to hold the brief in government seems lukewarm. It's not because he likes being out of power but perhaps because, like all senior Tories, he has built volatility into his view of the world.

Davis' first job in government was as a junior minister in the Cabinet Office, in the Office for Public Services as it was then. It gave him a synoptic view of the civil service and public-sector performance: he jokes about reorganisation being the refuge of people who don't want to get on with the real business of changing service provision.

Wouldn't he have made a bigger splash and more of a contribution to effective governance if he had remained at the Public Accounts Committee? Chairing the committee is prestigious. It's the most powerful job an MP can hold, short of becoming a minister. Davis was chair for four years, not long enough to make a real mark, though he claims credit for the establishment of a committee, led by Lord Sharman, that recommended extending the remit of the PAC and the National Audit Office to more quangos and off-the-books agencies.