Profile: Will Adam Afriyie get pay back for his battles against the MPs' expenses system?
Until now, Adam Afriyie’s biggest impact on the political stage has been limited to his concern for his colleagues wrestling with the new MPs’ expenses regime.
The MP for Windsor, who has never claimed a penny in second home expenses since being elected to Parliament in 2005, set up and ran his own Commons probe into the scheme.
His special select committee reported in 2011, recommending a new system of flat rate allowances to replace the more elaborate one operated by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority.
Mr Afriyie’s crusade against the allowances system did not end there. He recently backed a legal challenge by MPs who want to hang onto their profits on their second homes made between May 2010 and last August when he practice was banned.
Seventy MPs are thought to have claimed nearly £1million in mortgage interest payments over the period. Last month The Daily Telegraph disclosed how the MPs had hired a lawyer to fight their case in the High Court.
Mr Afriyie refused to comment on claims that he was using some of his £100million fortune to help to fund the MPs’ legal action.
But he said it was only right that Ipsa was “answerable in law for the fairness and legality of its actions and the rules created by the board and executives”.
The weekend revelations, run separately by three national newspapers, that up to 40 Tory MPs want him to replace David Cameron if the Tories lose the 2015 election would appear to show that Mr Afriyie’s investment in his colleagues may be being repaid.
Little wonder that on Sunday, Nadine Dorries MP said that Mr Afriyie had acted like a “human resources department” to his fellow MPs. If Labour has its version of Barack Obama in Chuka Umunna, then the Conservatives so can lay claim to the “Tory Obama” in the shape of Mr Afriyie.
Mr Afriyie might now live in a smart home in Westminster but his upbringing was a different world to the privileged childhood known by his leader David Cameron.
In an interview in 2009, he described how he was brought up in a council house in Peckham “surrounded by some of the most violent estates in London”.
He described his mother as his “rock, the gel at the centre of my life, although her tumultuous relationships with different men made for a constant state of flux at the boundaries of our family”.
He described his family as “the Peckham version of the Brady Bunch, chaotic and classically disadvantaged. From time to time the food would run out. I knew what it was to go hungry”.
One of his neighbours, he said, went to prison for murder, another for armed robbery, and many friends “later ended up on drugs or in jail”.
He went to the same primary school later attended by the murdered schoolboy Damilola Taylor, before his mother took a night job at the BBC and saved enough to send him to private school for a couple of years.
He later went to grammar school before winning a place at Imperial College London, and going on to make millions in information technology.
In politics, Mr Afriyie joined the Conservatives in 1989 – a move he has described as a “deeply unfashionable move for a man of colour to make” - before being selected for and winning the safe Tory seat of Windsor in 2005.
Mr Afriyie is married to his barrister second wife Tracy-Jane, and the pair have four young children.