Utah senator has been on a quiet mission to rebrand his image and that of the radical Republican wing he represents

He’s the Tea Party darling with an impeccably conservative voting record, known in Washington as the right-hand man to Ted Cruz, the uncompromising Texas senator who infuriated mainstream Republicans by bringing the federal government to a halt last year.

Yet in the months since senator Mike Lee helped Cruz orchestrate the shutdown, Lee has been on a quiet mission to rebrand his image and, by association, that of the radical Republican wing he represents.

“Few have done more to burn ideological bridges within the GOP,” said Michael Gerson, the former chief speechwriter for president George W Bush, who has noted the shift. “Yet no one from the Tea Party side is now doing more to construct them.”

The cause Lee believes will help build bridges among Republicans? Combating poverty.

“There is a natural tension that tends to exist between a party’s base and its elected political leaders,” Lee said in recent interview with the Guardian. “That tension has created what some have described as a hole within the Republican party.”

“But I think that hole is exactly the size and shape of a conservative reform agenda – one that focuses on economic opportunity and upward mobility, one that focuses on fighting poverty and helping the middle class.”

He added: “This is one of the things that can help bridge that gap, that can help fill that hole.”

Tackling poverty may seem a counter-intuitive agenda for one of the most conservative figures in Congress, least of all one who claims to want to heal wounds in the Republican party.

But he is not the only top Republican figure to lay out a manifesto for dealing with inequality, an issue many believe needs to be addressed to counter the populist Democratic campaigns expected in this year’s midterm elections.

A host of other Republicans, including Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor in the House, and Marco Rubio in the Senate, have done the same.

But arguably none have been as committed to the cause in recent months as Lee, who declared a “war on poverty” last November.

Vanessa Williamson, a Harvard academic who co-wrote a book on the Tea Party, said the GOP may be realising it needs to moderate its message, even if the policies remains trenchantly conservative.

“Many people in the Republican Party have noticed that extreme tactics haven’t been working very well for them lately,” she said. “They went to the mat on a number of government shutdown-type approaches - the absolute non-compromise tactical position. But I think there is less disagreement on the policy goals, which tend to remain relatively extreme.”

Lee is arguably a case in point. While he may have adopted a traditionally liberal cause his prescriptions are rooted in firmly conservative ground. In his view, government causes poverty, and has little hope of alleviating the problem. Only the enabling power of a free-market economy, aided by a civic voluntary sector, higher rates of marriage, and more considered spending, will improve social mobility.

His latest contribution was a bill, introduced last week, that would restore a work requirement for recipients of food stamps that was first introduced by president Bill Clinton in 1996.

Joshua Smith, a senior policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal thinktank, described the measure as “completely backwards logic”, because it wrongly assumes there are swaths of unemployed people who would work if only they were given a nudge.

“In fact, it pretty clear the problem is a lack of labor demand,” he said.

Smith is even more scathing of another proposal contained in Lee’s bill: capping means-tested welfare spending at 2007 levels, a move the senator says will save $2.5tn. The reduction would be adjusted for inflation, phased in over three years, and only come into force when unemployment is below 6%.

But it still constitutes a dramatic reduction on government money spent on the poor – distorting a budget that ordinarily rises and falls depending on the performance of the economy. “It doesn’t make sense,” Smith said. “It can only hurt the most vulnerable people.”

Asked who would bear the burden of the massive welfare cut, Lee was non-committal. “It would have to be worked out between the various state programs, in figuring out how they are going to do more with less money,” he said.

In his speech before the rightwing Heritage Foundation in November, Lee did not mention plans to suck such large sums out of the food stamps program.

Instead, he acknowledge the US was “third from the bottom” among advanced countries in terms of upward social mobility, emphasising the need to help underprivileged schools.

Lee made no mention of deficit reduction or out-of-control government spending – a curious omission given his central role in the shutdown – and even went so far as to tell the audience: “Just as we cannot spend our way out of poverty, we cannot really cut our way out, either.”

All of which has some critics questioning whether Lee has merely been engaging in a rebranding exercise. “The senator is just talking the talk,” said one GOP insider. “He has an image problem he’s trying to fix.”

In his Heritage speech, Lee appeared to advocate a subtle shift away from the conservative obsession with same-sex marriage, saying the GOP’s focus should instead be on the economic advantages of marriage more broadly – something Lee said was strongly supported by research.

“In an earlier era, our assumptions and vocabulary might have expressed judgment instead of compassion, and closed doors instead of opening them,” he said. “Though the foundational importance of family has not changed – times and attitudes have.”

However, four months later, Lee has chosen to return to that same same-sex marriage debate with vigour, introducing a bill with Cruz that would effectively reverse the gains same-sex couples have made since a favourable supreme court decision last year.

There is perhaps one issue on which, by all accounts, Lee cannot be accused of a disconnect between his match rhetoric and actions. The senator’s push for reform of the criminal justice system, a drive he launched last summer, places him on firmly liberal-libertarian terrain.

He believes America puts too many people in prison for too long, and has introduced a bill with Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, to significantly reduce the sentences given to non-violent offenders. Lee says he wants more rehabilitation and less punishment.

When it was pointed out that he was advocating a traditionally Democratic position – one at odds with most Republicans – he replied: “To an extent, that is true … I think that needs to change. I think that there is a real opportunity here for conservatives to go beyond merely protesting against the government they don’t want, and move in the direction of the kind of government they do want.”