'Standing aside won't solve this'

"The whole thing is the most astonishing travesty," says Howard Flight, the sacked Tory MP. "The spin has been ridiculous. Saying I was saying we were going to cut public services - I mean, Christ, utter lies."

We are in the first-floor study of Flight's Westminster home for the first full print interview he's done since the crisis erupted. Five days into it, Michael Howard may want, in that favourite phrase of the beleaguered politician, to "move on" - but this Flight is refusing to be cancelled.

Flight is the third prospective Tory candidate to be fired this month for deviationist views - in his case, the belief that "the potential for taxpayer value is a good bit greater" than in the James review, the party's official blueprint for efficiency savings.

For Labour, the tape and its implications of a hidden agenda of cuts was a gift: so much so, in fact, that there are suspicions that the party recorded it themselves, then actually gave it as a present to their favourite journalist, Tom Baldwin of the Times. The fact that Flight played a central part in the James review was an added bonus.

Flight describes the hidden agenda theory as "absolute balls" and "spin." He spent the fateful meeting, he says, giving the "standard stuff " about the James review. "What then happened, given the body of people at the meeting, was that they said we weren't being radical enough, and I then defended [the review] and Michael [Howard] for a long time."

Flight is obviously telling the truth. It is easy to see how he got into these dangerous waters. He is not a guarded talker. He clearly believes in the general principles he outlined on the secretly-recorded tape, his main crime perhaps being not to make clear that they were not party policy.

"The central issue of this election," he says, "is that there was a consensus four or five years ago that people were happy to pay higher taxes to have better services. But Michael said it: they paid their taxes and precious little has got through. If you look at the figures, it's 70 per cent more cash spending and 16 per cent more delivery.

"The old virtue of the NHS was that it was, bluntly, a relatively lowcost way of delivering reasonably good healthcare. What's happened since is that it's actually become high-cost for delivering pretty mediocre healthcare."

The issue of controlling public spending is central to this election, Flight says.

These quotes may be enough to construct fresh "Tory hidden agenda" stories about the NHS - although Flight stresses he's committed to free healthcare. What they actually signify, however, is a politician who remains willing to trespass outside the narrow limits permitted to most ambitious MPs.

Flight's openness has got him, and his party, into trouble. But it has also made him a wide body of friends, many of whom are coming to his defence. They feel he has been treated, in his chairman's words, "brutally." Parliamentary colleagues are worried about the precedent set by Flight's defenestration.

He has obtained legal advice that only his own constituency party members in Arundel can sack him as their MP, not Mr Howard. His supporters have obtained the signatures needed to put the issue to an extraordinary general meeting of the local party.

You will fight to remain the Tory candidate for Arundel, I ask. "Yes. But it's more than that. To cleanse all the nonsense that's happened, and close it down, common sense as well as the party constitution says that the best way of doing that is to let the members decide."

But don't the party's prospects depend on it being seen to be united? Even if you've been treated unfairly, isn't your duty to sit down and take it? "I've asked myself that question," says Flight."I don't think if I walk away it solves the problem. If anything, it makes it run. I don't like what's happening, but I'm not on all fours. I've got plenty of other things to do."