David Evans: Self-made millionaire and chairman of Luton Town who became an unashamedly outspoken Tory MP

David Evans was perhaps the most representative figure in a process that has been described as the "down-marketing" of Tory MPs in the Thatcher era. A rough-hewn, self-made millionaire, memorably described as "a bruiser with a big heart, if you knew where to look for it", he was an unabashed populist, close at times to self-parody.

At heart he remained a working-class Tory, and one who prided himself on expressing what he believed to be their views with a bluntness that would have shocked many. He routinely abused socialists, homosexuals and the work-shy, and he could be boorishly, almost grotesquely insensitive. Eight weeks before polling day in his unsuccessful campaign to retain Welwyn and Hatfield for the Conservative Party in 1997, he not only attacked his Labour opponent, Melanie Johnson, as a single woman with three bastard children who had never had a proper job, but chose to do so to an audience of sixth-formers during a current affairs lessons at his local Stanborough School.

The story made the early evening news on ITV and dominated the headlines the next morning. It overshadowed the Tories' pre-election offensive and led the papers to recall that he had said of the Prime Minister, John Major, that he found him "vindictive and not forgiving" and had described Virginia Bottomley as "dead from the neck up". Evans apologised for the latter remark. But, whatever his public image, in private Evans was amicable and a good companion. He was also generous to a fault, and an assiduous constituency MP, with a wholly genuine concern to sort out the problems of the hundreds who wrote to him.

He had a knack of letting you know just how much he had achieved without seeming arrogant or self satisfied, and indeed he had much to be proud about. Born in north London, the son of a Post Office employee, he failed his 11 plus, making good by attending Tottenham Technical College after he left school. At the age of 10 he had his own milk round, but his interests and ambitions were at first concentrated on sport. He was on the books of Aston Villa from 1950 until 1954, but never made the first team. An opening bat, who played some games for Hertfordshire and later captained the Club Cricket Conference, he was good enough to be taken on by Warwickshire and Gloucestershire, 1952-56, but made no first-class appearances.

At the age of 25, therefore, he set up an office cleaning business with his wife, Janice. Executive Office Cleaning operated out of a domestic garage and he and his wife did most of the cleaning. Everything changed when the firm was the first to win an outsourced contract for refuse collection and street cleansing, from Southend Borough Council in Essex. That started him on the road to his first million. By 1982 he was chairman and managing director of Brengreen Holdings with 15 subsidiary companies and 30,000 employees. When he sold it on in 1986, the firm fetched £32m.

He had invested part of his fortune in Luton Football Club in 1976 and, as its chairman from 1984 until 1989, presided over one of the most successful periods in its history; however, when he left the club, he insisted on withdrawing his investment, forcing the club into the hands of the borough council. In 1986-87 he made an ill-judged attempt to deal with football hooliganism by banning away fans from the ground. Thereafter he busied himself with schemes for football identity cards, an idea which he successfully sold to Margaret Thatcher.

Evans had joined the Conservative Party in 1968 and immediately sought to become a parliamentary candidate. As he observed ruefully, "under Heath the Tories were all stockbrokers and landed gentry; I didn't have the right accent." More to the point, he did not have any political experience, and when he tried politics again in 1976, it was by way of the St Albans Conservative Association and local government. Elected a Wheathampstead parish councillor in 1979, he joined the St Albans District Council a year later.

He was selected to fight the Conservative marginal of Welwyn and Hatfield in 1986. He was a seen as a colourful and popular figure, a strong Thatcherite, who put his views clearly and simply, but also with wit and force. Although there was a slight swing against him, a majority of 10,903 in a fight where he was up against an independent Conservative as well as challenges from both Labour and the SDP was a good one.

As an MP he was very much his own man. His maiden speech was a paean in praise of privatisation, but he refused to vote on Member's pay, describing £18,000 a year as "an absolute joke" in terms of what was expected of them – they should either get £50,000 or nothing. In November 1987, he voted against the merger of British Airways and British Caledonian as a diminution of competition.

Wealthy enough to be totally independent, he could not see himself making Cabinet and had little appetite for lesser office. He was persuaded to become PPS to Lord Hesketh, Minister for Industry, in 1990, and joined John Redwood as his PPS in 1991, following him from the DTI to the Department of the Environment and then briefly to the Welsh Office when Redwood became Secretary of State for Wales. But he left the job to secure election to the executive of the 1922 Committee. There he invoked "family values" against a string of ministers exposed for their sexual peccadilloes.

In 1995 he was instrumental in persuading Redwood to run for the leadership against John Major and acted as his campaign manager.

In the Commons, Evans cast himself as a combination of Norman Tebbit and Alf Garnett: he told the European Commission to "get stuffed", advocated the hanging of murderers, opposed abortion, and said of football hooligans, "Give'em scars for the rest of the lives". As the commentator Simon Heffer once observed, he was "famed for his view that the cat o' nine tails is the progressive answer to football hooligans." The two became fast friends. "I'm a very right-wing disciplinarian; I don't trust Russians; the more nuclear weapons the better," was the way in which Evans summed up his views in the late 1980s. Add his vehement defence of grammar schools and a dislike of immigration bordering on racism and one can see why he was regarded as the voice of the archetypal working-class Tory.

There were those, however, mainly friends, who thought that at times his tongue was firmly in his cheek when making his more outrageously over-the-top remarks. With like-minded colleagues like David Shaw and Teresa Gorman he became one of the more effective attack dogs in the Tory armoury.

Evans held his seat with a slightly reduced majority in 1992, but five years later the electoral tide was too strong for him. He did rather better than most in the South East to hold down the swing against him to 11 per cent. When asked whether his earlier remarks about Melanie Johnson had cost him his seat, he told Election '97 that he was not sure: "Yes, people said to me in the constituency that they didn't like what I said about her, but then they said they agreed with me." Shrewdly he observed that the reason that his party had done so badly was because Blair had come across as "a good Tory leader with good Tory policies".

Throughout his decade in Parliament he had kept close contact with the business world, taking directorships in a number of companies. In 1990 he became chairman of Broadreach Services, later the Broadreach Group, which had contracts with companies including Sainsburys and Homebase, and continued until 2002, when it was sold for £17m.

John Barnes

David John Evans, politician and businessman: born London 23 April 1935; chairman and managing director, Brengreen (Holdings) 1960-86; chairman, Luton Town Football and Athletic Co 1984-89 (director 1977-90); MP (Conservative) for Welwyn Hatfield 1987-97; Parliamentary Private Secretary to Minister of State for Industry 1990-91, to Minister for Corporate Affairs 1991-92, to Minister of State for Local Government and Inner Cities 1992-93, to Secretary of State for Wales 1993; chairman, Broadreach Group 1990-2002; married 1956 Janice Masters (two sons, one daughter); died 22 October 2008.