Nice idea, Dave. Cut ministers’ salaries, dump a third of their chauffeur-driven chariots and bump up the price of subsidised Westminster tuck to a level that might ring a bell with the humble voter. Isn’t that just what we want to hear when we’re still reeling from the pong of all the nasty stuff that steamed into our nostrils during the MPs expenses scandal?

David Cameron thinks so. But as the newly demoted Alan Duncan has pointed out — unwisely but pertinently — there are limits. He didn’t quite say, pay peanuts and you get monkeys, but he is not the first to understand that if you cut the funding of our political leaders to the bone, it will be difficult to attract able — and potentially high-earning — people into politics unless they are independently wealthy.

Peter Davies is not wealthy. He is a retired religious studies teacher, but as the Mayor of Doncaster, an English Democrat elected in June at the height of the MPs expenses debacle, he is already putting Cameron’s ideas to the test. Davies slashed his own salary from £73,000 to £30,000, disposed of the mayor’s chauffeur-driven Toyota Prius and plans to cut the number of the town’s councillors from 63 to 21.

“People are suspicious of anyone in local government,” he says. “I thought, let’s go back to the days when public service was important and people gave of themselves to the town, show the people of Doncaster that I’m here to serve them and not in it for any self-gain. Here’s a different agenda, one that appears to coincide with what the man on the Clapham omnibus is thinking.”

Davies prides himself on saying what he thinks. He supports “harsh punishment for young thugs” and promises to run a no-frills value-for-money bureaucracy that will maintain essential services and eradicate what he regards as politically correct dead wood. Yet his tactics are raising questions, not least one that is applicable to Westminster at a time when it suddenly feels bound to cut the cost of its workforce. Has Davies, who has never previously held a publicly elected office, got the experience and nous to take on a big political job?

Prior to his administration Doncaster had been led by a socialist council for 35 years. Did the voters realise how right wing he is? “I don’t think I am right wing. Labour voters will tell you they’re in favour of capital punishment, they’re fed up of Eastern European immigration. People can just wander into the country willy-nilly. Right, left and even centre have gone.” So where do you stand? “I don’t know. I stand where the ordinary citizen stands who feels neglected by the three main political parties.” Do you support capital punishment? “Yeah, I do.” To what extent? Hanging? “I’m not bothered what the means is.”

It’s the “don’t know” words that are strange in a political context, and Davies uses them a lot. He wants to tackle antisocial behaviour but doesn’t know how this will work, he wants to remove PC jobs but doesn’t know where they are in his council, he doesn’t know how much money he has saved because he hasn’t yet added it up, and replies by working through the individual items. This may be honest, guileless and entirely lacking in spin — but do we want to be led by people who can’t anticipate, who admit they don’t have answers? Doesn’t good leadership depend on a sense of confidence and certainty that provides security for those operating below?

We are in the mayor’s office, a plain room in an ugly 1960s tower block once used by the National Coal Board. The grey walls are scuffed and there is no computer on Davies’ desk — he doesn’t use them, and neither does he accept calls on his mobile phone. It is hard to guage how his populist messages are going down in Doncaster — and whether Cameron might learn a lesson from him. Speak to people in the streets and it seems that they have yet to form an clear opinion, though he says his office has received 2,000 e-mails of support. There is a campaign against him on the internet, and there are others who dissect the moments when he has been unguarded and unprepared but the mayor doesn’t read their rumblings.

If the majority have yet to make up their minds about him it is perhaps because while he is well-intentioned and has a remarkable lack of ego for a politician, he doesn’t come across as a man who listens. Did he expect to be elected? “No.” Was he ready for it? “Yes.”

That is hard to believe. What did he mean when he wrote in his manifesto that he would scrap politically correct non-jobs “and encourage the former employees to seek meaningful employment”.

“It was a throwaway remark, wasn’t it?” Can there be such a thing in politics? “My manifestos are truthful but there’s an element of humour in there. I get quizzed on every nuance but my manifesto is going to be kept far more than any political party’s has been kept in the past.”

Davies is 66, the son of a socialist butcher from a mining background, and a Conservative mother from a farming family. His childhood on a farm outside Doncaster was idyllic, and for the first ten years of his adult life he voted Labour.

In 1973 he attended a Mayday socialist rally, realised he didn’t fit in, and joined the Conservative party three weeks later. Twenty years after that, when John Major signed the Maastrict treaty, Davies joined UKIP, but left when it split in 2000. He joined the English Democrats five years later, and supports its call for a separate English parliament.

“It’s a very popular message, I tell you. Dead easy. You would reduce the number in Westminster, throw that lot out altogether, probably only need 50 of them to do things like defence and law and order.

“National politics should listen to what people want. What we’ve got is a patronising and condescending approach from the three main parties, they know best, there’s no debate, completely out of touch with the public. We’re full of professional politicians, people who have no experience in life of anything outside that cocoon of the House of Commons.”

True, Davies has lived outside that cocoon. He has spent 30 years entertaining children in classrooms, he maintains — “A teacher has got to be a ham actor” — and now he lives in a small detached house with his second wife and two cats, drives himself to work in a Nissan Almeira Twister, and uses his leisure time reading Thomas Hardy, watching cricket and betting to support his part-ownership of three horses. There are those who think he is admirable, others who would describe him as an amateur who is on a steep learning curve.

“If you tell people things as they are, and you’re honest, then you’re halfway there,” he maintains. “There’s a difference between mistakes in policies or things that I don’t do, and words and nuances.” Which will come as news to Westminster.

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