Ian MacArthur

Long-serving MP and quietly effective leader of the Scottish Conservatives

Ian MacArthur, MP for Perth and East Perthshire from 1959 to 1974, was a quietly effective leader of Scottish conservatism. While his party was in opposition he was a whip, 1963-63, and Scottish affairs spokesman, 1965-70. He was vice-chairman of the Conservative Party in Scotland, 1972-75, and chairman of the Scottish Conservatives Members' Committee, 1972–73.

He also piloted four Private Member's Bills into law, most notably the Domicile and Matrimonial Proceedings Act (1973). This freed separated — but not divorced — women from being legally domiciled wherever their husbands were, and so, as Lord Denning put it, abolished “the last barbarous relic of a wife's servitude”.

MacArthur was born in 1925, the younger son of Lieutenant-General Sir William MacArthur, and educated at Cheltenham College. Joining the Navy after school he saw active service in the Mediterranean in destroyers, remaining partially deaf in his left ear as the result of gunfire during the Italian campaign. He finished the war as flag lieutenant to C-in-C Portsmouth (a role which, he later said, involved making himself invisible and saluting a lot, and in which he became friends with the Duke of Edinburgh).

After the war he studied modern languages at Queen's College, Oxford. He then worked at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in London, ultimately becoming director of administration.

MacArthur had been an active Young Conservative, and politics was his real passion. He contested Greenock twice in 1955, in the general election and a by-election, and came close to winning this seemingly impregnable Labour citadel. He was rewarded for his perseverance with selection for Perth and East Perthshire in 1959, for which he sat until 1974. He was re-elected in February that year with a comfortable majority of 8,975, but that October fell victim to the Scottish National Party, losing by 793 votes.

From 1977 until his retirement in 1989 he was director of the British Textile Confederation.

A fine musician, a fluent French- speaker and a lifelong Francophile, MacArthur sang and played the piano and as a young man earned extra income singing French songs in London nightclubs; and he even recorded a couple of records.

A lifelong friend of Poland, he was awarded the Gold Cross of Merit by the Polish Government in exile in 1971. He was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1984 and appointed OBE in 1989.

He is survived by his wife, Judith, and seven children.

Ian MacArthur, OBE, MP for Perth and East Perthshire, 1959-74, was born on May 17, 1925. He died on November 30, 2007, aged 82