Is Dan the man?

I first heard the name ‘Dan Jarvis’ on a dance floor at a wedding in Bath. ‘Move like Jagger’ was thumping through the speakers, and most people had given up trying to chat, but I’d been collared by a cavalry officer who was damned if he was going to let disco get in the way of his politics. ‘Not enough soldiers in the Commons,’ he yelled at me, ‘and the ones who are there are a bit flawed. There is one chap though,’ he paused for effect: ‘Jarvis, he’s called Dan Jarvis. A Labour MP, but who cares? He’s a proper soldier. Just what the country needs. Should be prime minister. I’m telling you.’ The glitterball threw a veil of little lights over his military chin.

The next week, I heard Jarvis’s name again — from a life-long Conservative now so weary of what he called Cameron’s ‘inept modernising’ that he might be persuaded, he said, to vote Labour if a chap like Dan were in charge.

What is a chap like Dan? One tailor-made for Tories, that’s what. He’s an ex-para who’s served in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. As a young man, he set off to climb K2 in a tweed jacket and his grandfather’s flat cap. There’s a sad side to Dan, too. In 2006, his wife was diagnosed with cancer — which is, in part, why he left the army — and in 2010 she died, leaving him with two small children. But paras don’t mope. Utrinque Paratus: ready for anything. Just a year into his political career, he’s already shadow arts minister and has made a name for himself defending local libraries.

If there was a final push needed, to get me to Barnsley to meet this paragon, it was a whisper that the very existence of Major Dan Jarvis MBE was giving Cameron’s gang the heebie-jeebies.