For a man precariously perched a top a wafer-thin majority of 130, Jonathan Evans, MP and junior minister at the Department of Trade and Industry, is remarkably calm and confident.

Surely, if the brave new Blair bandwagon rolls into Westminster in less than two years' time, Mr Evans' Brecon & Radnor seat in Wales could be one of the first to fall.Perhaps his ease is bred in the near certainty of fate.

Or, more likely, it is the knowledge that he could return to a successful career as a solicitor after the next general election.In the meantime, Mr Evans appears to be making the most of his short time at Westminster - he was a new boy with the 1992 intake - and more recently Whitehall.

Junior ministers in this government have a high level of political fatality, but observers reckon that Mr Evans is about as safe a pair of hands as the prime minister could possibly hope for.Twenty years ago Mr Evans was articled to the Cardiff-based firm Leo Abse & Cohen, which was founded by the Labour MP Leo Abse.

Following qualification he was offered a position with the firm and did not leave until graduating to the same place that lured his senior partner.Most of Mr Evans' legal practice was spent doing either criminal or child care law with, perhaps, a slight emphasis on the former.

By his own reckoning Mr Evans acted in more than 40 murder cases, and was involved in some way with nearly all the major criminal cases in Wales during the 1970s and 1980s.

He also acted for French interests in the great fisheries disputes in the early 1980s and, during the four years before being elected as an MP, he was deputy chairman of the Housing Corporation of Wales, the biggest spending public body in the principality.Last October he was appointed parliamentary under secretary of state for corporate affairs at the Department of Trade and Industry.

And, only a fortnight ago, his brief was extended to include consumer affairs, a position which ultimately might bring him into the firing line over a question dear to many of his professional siblings: conveyancing fees.Indeed, Mr Evans currently shies away from the suggestion that the government would ever intervene to protect the consumer from shoddy conveyancing work by insisting on minimum charges.

In his view, solicitors have only themselves to blame for th e cut-price conveyancing chaos and they should not look plaintively to government to bale them out.'The profession itself has driven down the costs in conveyancing,' he says.

And, even if the government were minded towards intervention, 'I am not sure we could get through the House of Commons legislation saying there was a fee below which solicitors should not do a conveyance.'Where he is more keen to help solicitor interests is in his capacity as deregulation minister.

Law Society officials have pressed Mr Evans to cut the red tape currently delaying the measures going through the sched 4 process of the Courts and Legal Services Act.

The minister maintains he is sympathetic and says he has raised the matter with John Taylor, his counterpart at the Lord Chancellor's Department.What Mr Evans is most enthusiastic about are the efforts his own department has made to sharpen the efficiency of internal legal advice.

All DTI in-house lawyers - across five divisions - fall under his responsibility, and the department has instituted tough procedures for comparing internal advice with that available from the private sector.'One of the efforts we are making towards driving efficiency within the DTI is to ensure that those people who are offering legal advice are offering it in a cost-efficient way to individual departments,' explains Mr Evans in the market-speak which has become the trademark of 15 years of Conservative government.

'Rather than us employing staff and not working out what the cost of these things is, we have mechanisms within the department to assess what the overall cost may be.

We are seeking to expose the way solicitors work within the government machine to market disciplines.'So far, however, Mr Evans concedes, in-house DTI lawyers generally win out as providing advice to department divisions most cost efficiently.

But there is not just a competitive relationship between the department's lawyers and private firm solicitors.

Mr Evans organises frequent seminars where private practice solicitors are brought in to exchange views with their DTI counterparts.

'We want department lawyers to be able to learn from the way in which private sector firms are delivering services.'Value for money is something the legal profession would be well advised to look at generally, says Mr Evans.

Although he is adamant that there is no blurring of his role and that of the under secretary of state at the LCD, Mr Evans has his own views over where the profession is getting it wrong.Again, wearing his new consumer affairs hat, Mr Evans says he is 'concerned that in a sense we [lawyers] are failing as a profession to respond adequately to what the needs of the market may be'.

While every solicitor would like to have clients who are willing to pay substantial fees for the benefit of top legal advice, reality is somewhat different.

'There is quite a substantial number of people, particularly amongst the middle income earners, who need to have access to legal advice.

And they may feel that the current structure or delivery of legal advice - the demarcation between the solicitors' and barristers' professions, for example - is not adequately responding to what their needs are.'Mr Evans is also sceptical of the Law Society's retention of the trainee minimum wage.

Again, he sees it in free market terms, employing the language of opportunity.

'I wonder whether we are really helping young people to come into the legal profession by having a minimum requirement on what they can be paid.'Once in the profession, however, Mr Evans is confident that entrants are exposed to one of the most effective springboards and training grounds for a parliamentary and ministerial post.

'One of the interesting things which is debated in politics nowadays is whether those people who come to Parliament are sufficiently in touch with what the concerns of the electorate may be.

Every lawyer in a high street practice is going to see a variety of cases coming forward.

It is as good a grounding for political life as any other.'Just how much more of a political life Mr Evans can look forward to beyond the next general election is in the balance.

But he remains optimistic: 'I believe in trends.

I never look at numbers.

At the last election, 40 Conservatives lost their seats.

I won my seat from the opposition.

So it is not the numbers that count, it is the direction you are going in.

I feel I am going forwards.'