As Ian Gilmour, the liberal Conservative politician, Lord Gilmour of Craigmillar, who has died aged 81, served briefly as Edward Heath's defence secretary and for two years as lord privy seal under the less congenial leadership of Margaret Thatcher.
But though he was a prime mover in the independence of Zimbabwe and involved in successful European budget negotiations, his reputation rests less upon his time in office than on his longer term opposition to Thatcher and Thatcherism. His background as proprietor (1954-67) and editor (1954-59) of the Spectator, and his books, made him a different kind of Tory. He was also one of the most consistent, and constructive opponents of Ricardian free market economics and their social consequences to be found in parliament.
Gilmour was an intellectual, but he was also a toff. The son of Colonel Sir John Gilmour, baronet, and his wife, a granddaughter of the Earl of Cadogan, he was educated at Eton and Balliol College Oxford, and served in the Grenadier Guards (1944-47). In 1951, he married Lady Caroline Margaret Montagu-Douglas-Scott, daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch. The following year he was called to the Inner Temple bar.
He first attracted attention with his purchase of the somnolent Spectator in 1954. Having Arab sympathies, coincident with, but not derived from, his Middle East business interests, he was at least as passionate an opponent of Suez as the then Labour leadership. In October 1956, he called the man behind Britain's role in the adventure, prime minister Anthony Eden, "a liar". Gilmour's Spectator was humanitarian in social matters, anti-adventure in foreign affairs and Keynesian in economics. Graced by deputy editor Brian Inglis, Washington correspondent Henry Fairlie and the young Bernard Levin (obituary, August 10 2004), it was a sparkling equal to the then dominant New Statesman.
By 1957 Eden had been replaced as prime minister by Harold Macmillan, and finally, in 1962, Gilmour found himself a winnable Tory seat, Norfolk Central. (He would be redistributed to Amersham and Chesham in 1974.) At a time when Conservatives were faring badly in byelections, he scraped home by 200 votes. He had described himself as "a Macmillan man", but when the neurotic, vengeful side of Macmillan took over during illness in the summer of 1963, with all efforts being directed to blocking the succession of RA Butler, Gilmour would be a Macmillan man no longer. The Spectator editorship, which, as its editor concentrated on getting into parliament, had been vested in Iain Hamilton, was given to Iain Macleod, who, with Enoch Powell, had resigned in protest at Macmillan's devious eccentricities.
Gilmour's early parliamentary contributions reflected his Spectator mindset. The journal had opposed the death penalty, he voted for abolition; it had supported Europe, so did he; it had campaigned against censorship of books and theatre, so did Gilmour. The magazine supported the legalisation of homosexuality - so did the member for Norfolk Central.
Although Gilmour had (surprisingly) been a strong supporter of Lord Hailsham (obituary, October 15 2001) in the 1963 Tory leadership struggle, he was happy enough with the leader after July 1965; like himself, Heath (obituary, July 18 2005) was a social liberal and dedicated European. He would set a career pattern by starting in 1970 as junior defence minister (procurement) before advancing to minister of state under his friend, Lord Carrington, in 1972. In the last weeks of the Conservative government in January 1974, when Heath's position was being demolished by the leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers, Gilmour succeeded to the cabinet for the briefest sojourn as defence secretary.
Not happy at the replacement later that year of Heath by Thatcher, he worked at loyalty, but was never comfortable. The element of hysteria latent in Thatcher, and her compulsive adversarialism, was alien to him. Beyond that, his support for the postwar consensus in British politics was not based on casual acceptance. It was, for him, a carefully reached conviction - it was what he was about.
Gilmour was very much more than the gentlemanly maker of social concessions for which many, including this writer, once took him. He could work only at the places he was likely to be sent, Defence or the Foreign Office. As lord privy seal (1979-81), he was, in effect, an additional foreign minister in collaboration with Carrington, a like-minded figure.
The main issue he faced was Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. Under white domination, the Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith had declared unilateral independence in 1965, and sanctions, whose failure had so humiliated Labour's Harold Wilson, had finally gnawed through the economy. Gilmour believed in African self-government, disliked Smith's racial arrogance and had been impressed by Robert Mugabe. He faced bitter hostility from the Tory old right as he choreographed Smith's exit. And when the 1980 elections showed the whites' favourite African, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, beaten hollow by Mugabe, he was sanguine.
As for Europe, he would write amusingly in his memoirs, Dancing with Dogma: Britain Under Thatcherism (1992), how negotiating on a budget "refund" (as Thatcher called it), they obtained through the good offices of the German deputy finance minister, Klaus Von Dohnanyi, a deal reducing the British contribution by two-thirds for two years with an option for a third if structural change in the common agricultural policy had not been achieved. Returning elated to Northolt airport, Gilmour and Carrington were summoned to Chequers and subjected to a blazing (and factually wrong) two-hour assault, without a cup of tea, by a hectoring Thatcher. "The prime minister was like a firework whose fuse had been already lit; we could almost hear the sizzling."
Gilmour would be sacked in 1981, bitterly regretting that he had not resigned before. But, remote from official Conservatism, he stayed and argued back in the Commons until 1992 and his elevation as Lord Gilmour of Craigmillar. That opposition would be prophetic beyond the 1980s and was also reflected in a number of elegant, closely reasoned books, such as Britain Can Work (1983) and Whatever Happened to the Tories: a History of the Conservative Party Since 1945 (1997). His other works include The Body Politic (1969), Inside Right: a Study of Conservatism (1977), and Riot, Risings and Revolution: Governance and Violence in 18th Century England (1992). His last book was The Making of the Poets: the Early Lives of Byron and Shelley (2002).
Gilmour opposed and/or voted against most Thatcher mistakes and diktats - the paving bill to abolish the Greater London council, denial to local authorities of council house sales revenue, the freeze on child benefit, the poll tax, the three-line whip against Conservative MP Richard Shepherd's reform of the Official Secrets Act, identity cards at football matches and the then chancellor Nigel Lawson's "extremely slack financial policy". There was a peculiar poignancy about his call to meet the massive unemployment of the day with investment in reshaping a battered infrastructure. He was president of Medical Aid for the Palestinians (1993-96) and chairman of the Byron Society from 2003.
Rational, polite and scornful, Gilmour had no power, and for years was clean out of fashion. But viewed from the debris of the "nasty" party, he looks remarkably prescient. Fortunate in his marriage to a gently graceful wife without enemies, and in five children with bright careers of their own, he had a happy personal and frustrating political life. Sticking to his guns, he put down a marker for a Toryism reaching beyond tax cuts and class war. His children survive him.
Julian Critchley writes ... William Hague once described Ian Gilmour as the "most elegant" of the so-called wets. A tall, even languid figure, he might have been the reincarnation of Arthur Balfour; certainly he matched the Edwardian Tory premier in terms of intellectual grasp and intelligence. But, as a friend once observed, having listened to him perform in the Commons, he could box but he could not punch. His nice line in irony was not appreciated by a Tory party whose intelligence fell far beneath his own. A shy man, easily bored, who spoke with something of a graveside manner, he came into his own not in the house but when he put pen to paper.
An annual event that seemed somehow to mark the years of Thatcher's dominance was the garden party that Ian and his wife held at their home in Isleworth, Middlesex. It was the meeting of the "Tories en exile", all Ian's friends in the party, together with Roy Jenkins (obituary, January 6 2003) and the remaining members of the Gang of Four. The Queen Mother (obituary, April 1 2002) was a frequent guest.
Had the political cards fallen differently, Gilmour could have become a dominant figure in Tory politics. In what Lloyd George once called "the stupid party", he shone like a good deed in a wicked world. He belonged to a different and more gracious age.
· Ian Hedworth John Little Gilmour, Baron Gilmour of Craigmillar, politician, editor and writer, born July 8 1926; died September 21 2007
· The note by Sir Julian Critchley has been revised since his death in 2000
· This article was amended on Monday September 24 2007. We said that Lord Gilmour was survived by his wife Caroline. In fact she died in 2004.