On the naughty step with Lord Gary Porter

This may make Mr Porter look like a bit of a maverick, and indeed he can cause annoyance within the blue ranks for his outspoken nature. This is something he appears to enjoy.

“I get on the naughty step quite often over housing,” he says with a wry grin. But that doesn’t deter him. “On housing, what I say is right. That’s it. There’s no way of misrepresenting it, no way of not interpreting it properly, it just is right.”

Nevertheless, he does accept that “there are a lot of people who wish I would shut up”.

His verbal autobiography is succinct: “Born in Walthamstow, grew up in Stevenage, moved to Peterborough for a year. Lived in Lincolnshire for 34 years.”

Despite all that time in the East Midlands, Mr Porter has not lost his M25 twang; he drops his aitches so thoroughly that “house” must be preceded by “an”, as opposed to “a”.

Spalding, where he lives as leader of South Holland District Council and represents as a life peer in the House of Lords, is “the closest to the 1950s as you can get” he says with quiet fondness. He is clearly a man who likes things retro – his distinctive haircut, for instance, wouldn’t be out of place at an early Beatles gig.

In person, he manages to be simultaneously gruff and jovial: “I thought this was for Inside Housing, not Vogue,” he exclaims during the photoshoot. “Just get me next to a nice three-bed and be done with it.”

Originally a bricklayer – though he claims to have been sacked from every job he’s ever had – Mr Porter is also a self-declared “housing anorak”. He says the two aren’t linked, however.

“Don’t get me wrong, I like building them,” he muses. “Good fun, pays decent money. But housing is intrinsic to everything else we do, particularly good housing. If you’ve got sh*t housing you’ve got a problem.

“We should make the Right to Buy policy fit for purpose"

“And you haven’t just got a housing problem, you’ve got an education problem, you’ve got a health problem, anti-social behaviour problem, whatever. All of the bad things stem from bad housing, and the best way to fix any of those problems is to make sure as a fundamental that everybody’s got safe, secure, decent housing.”

He then launches into an impassioned thesis on the Right to Buy – Margaret Thatcher’s flagship policy to allow council tenants to buy their homes at a generous discount, a policy reinvigorated enthusiastically by David Cameron.

As of six weeks ago, the Chartered Institute of Housing called for the government to suspend the policy.

As a “massive fan” of the Right to Buy, Mr Porter believes that’s wrong.

“We should make the Right to Buy policy fit for purpose. So I should be able to set the discount locally to stimulate the market, not to reward avaricious grandchildren. I should keep 100% of the capital receipts so I can afford to build a replacement unit. Then what’s wrong with [it]?

“Do I care as a council whether you’re renting it off me, or whether Mr Bradford and Mr Bingley are paying me the mortgage money? If I’ve got the capital I can build a brand new house, I can take somebody else off that [waiting] list.”

With these changes, he insists, the Right to Buy would shift from being the biggest barrier to local authority housebuilding to becoming an accelerant. Yet ministers are perpetually reluctant to tweak their beloved policy in any way.

So why does Mr Porter, as a Conservative, think that is?

“No idea,” he raises his hands palms-up. “Any politician who’s got a brain cell can see that’s kind of a virtuous circle, because you’ve got somebody who’s become an owner; they’re safe, secure, haven’t had to move house, kids are in the same school, they’re happy. And I’ve got the money to build a nice new shiny house for somebody else on the list.”

The only way he could make this a more attractive prospect for ministers, he quips, would be to throw chocolate or sex into the mix.

Our conversation takes place a day after the government missed its own deadline to publish the Social Housing Green Paper by the summer parliamentary recess. The cynic in him means he’s not necessarily disappointed, though: “It depends what’s in it. If it’s full of stuff we don’t like they don’t need to bring it out at all.

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“I’m optimistic in life, not in politics. I’d say there will be a few small moves in a positive way, and if the big stuff is missing then it will be another missed opportunity.”

Mr Porter has been praised for being prepared to stick his head above the parapet to criticise his party in this way – including by the judges of Inside Housing’s 2017 ‘Who’s Who in Local Authority Development’ list, which listed him as an ‘influencer’.

He surmises that some Conservatives’ apparent hostility towards him as a champion of mass council house building is related to the theory that those who rent vote red and those who own vote blue. But he dismisses this theory as “complete and utter pony”.

“The tenure you live in doesn’t determine who you vote for,” he maintains. “It might determine whether you bother to vote, but not who you vote for.

"And if you’re living in a cr*p house, one thing you won’t do is vote.”

Mr Porter came to politics during the 1997 general election, when he assisted with the successful Conservative campaign for the new seat of South Holland and The Deepings.

After that, he turned his energy on the council, helping the Tories take 20 seats at the 1999 local polls, becoming a councillor himself in a 2001 by-election. After the leader lost his seat at the 2003 elections, Mr Porter took up the mantle.