Tory champion of Commons committees with a showman's flair for promoting the arts
Norman St John-Stevas, Lord St John of Fawsley, who has died aged 82, was as vivid a personality as politics can bear. Mannered, self-applauding, with an aura of camp and given to tiffs and squabbles, he had outstanding intellectual gifts, vitiated, despite an underlay of real scholarship, by eternal public performance.
Stevas, whose career reached its highest points as arts minister towards the end of Edward Heath's Conservative government and as leader of the Commons with the arts brief again under Margaret Thatcher, made great play of his Roman Catholicism. However, his style was that sometimes more to be found in Anglo-Catholic circles – dressy and busily outrageous.
Born and brought up in London, he took his surname from eliding that of his Greek civil engineer father, Stephen Stevas, with the middle name of his Irish mother, Kitty St John O'Connor. His academic career was brilliant: from school at Ratcliffe college, Leicestershire, he gained a first in law at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he was president of the union in 1950. He became a Middle Temple barrister in 1952, and two further degrees at Oxford were followed by tutorships there and a Yale fellowship. In 1957, he received a London University PhD on the early work of the 19th-century constitutionalist Walter Bagehot. It would all be topped off with a visiting chair at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1969.
Yet Stevas's main academic achievement came through his inspired double involvement with the Economist (1954-59), as a many-hatted correspondent and editor of the writings of Bagehot, its founder. This went on to become an undertaking of 30 years.
Everything suggested that a political career would be equally dazzling. In 1951, Stevas swiftly paid the customary dues, contesting as a 22-year-old Conservative the safe Labour seat of Dagenham, to the east of London. He spent the next decade on the early parts of the Bagehot enterprise, and in academic posts in leading universities. Then came his selection for the safe Tory seat of Chelmsford, Essex. By the time Stevas entered the Commons in 1964, he was a published academic and top-of-the- market journalist. But politics proved a brutal environment and the gatekeepers to success would take against him.
He commonly split his time between earnestness and frivolity. His study Obscenity and the Law (1956) reflected an intellectual shift toward the law's retreat from the pulpit. Life, Death and the Law (1961), The Right to Life (1963) and The Law and Morals (1964) were earnest, too, with a liberal Catholic lawyer addressing difficult questions in a thoughtful spirit.
The frivolous Stevas appeared frequently with the Cambridge television satire crowd, on That Was the Week That Was. Once, he was asked by David Frost about the colour of his shirt: "What's that – purple?" "No," replied Stevas, "crushed cardinal." Meanwhile, his work on Bagehot grew, with volumes appearing in 1966, 1968 and 1974.
In parliament, Stevas applied himself to several party committees – home affairs, Europe and Northern Ireland – and he made the executive of the 1922 Committee. He achieved minor office as parliamentary under-secretary at the Department of Education and Science (1972-73), then minister of state for the arts in that department (1973-74), headed by Thatcher. It was the minimum that a pro-European (like Heath), cultivated, socially humane Tory might have expected after eight years in the house. The impression is of no great sympathy between him and his political leader.
Stevas's serious career, however, would both take off and crash with Thatcher, who became leader of the opposition from 1975. She quickly appointed him shadow education secretary, with Rhodes Boyson as his deputy. All they had in common was a doctorate of philosophy. Boyson – working-class, Lancashire by upbringing and speech, a working headteacher, rightwing, nonconformist – was yoked with a Cambridge exquisite, at once affected, dandified, liberal and provocative. In fact, they were both showmen, and the mutual loathing simply improved the show.
It was logical for Thatcher to advance Stevas, in 1978, from education to the shadow leadership of the Commons. The student of Bagehot was a keen thinker on constitutional matters, and a brief period – a year or so a shadow, and less than two as Commons leader (1979-81) – afforded him some scope for intelligent reform. The present system of extended select committees with powers of commanding evidence and making reports to ministers is essentially his work. With Bagehot, completed with Volume 15 in 1986, it is his memorial.
But Stevas, who thought himself a delightful courtier, lacked tact and political sense. The early Thatcher, coexisting with a liberal Tory establishment that underrated her ruthlessness, was in those days often cheeked. Stevas, a compulsive player to the gallery, joined in. Bright, disobliging remarks, like his coinage of Thatcher as "the Blessed Margaret" or "the Leaderene" and the aged Lord Thorneycroft, brought back from retirement as party chairman, as "a public monument on whom the prime minister has slapped a preservation order" antagonised a woman not known for a sense of humour.
In January 1981, she had Stevas demolished. Given a peerage in 1987, he quickly became a leading figure in the fund-processing and patronage-giving aspects of the arts. Chairman of the Royal Fine Art Commission (1985-99), he also held positions with the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, the National Youth Theatre, two major London orchestras, the Decorative Arts Society and Les Amis de Napoléon III.
During his time as master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (1991-96), he was often asked to comment on the difficulties surrounding the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales. He remained resolutely loyal to the royal family.
In 2003, as a Murdoch director, he caught the blast of shareholder displeasure at James Murdoch's promotion to chief executive of BskyB. In 2010, he was appointed an adviser on arts, religion and the constitution to Sky.
Otherwise, as Gran Ufficiale of the Italian Order of Merit and member of the Pontifical Council for Culture, he enjoyed the pleasant, tolerably remunerated life of an aesthetic bureaucrat, gliding between the useful and decorative functions of high culture.
• Norman Antony Francis St John-Stevas, Lord St John of Fawsley, politician and academic, born 18 May 1929; died 4 March 2012