A popular and hardworking West Midlands Conservative MP for 18 years from 1979, John Butcher held office as a junior minister in the Thatcher years, bringing an intelligent appraisal of the benefits of new technology to posts in the departments of Industry, Trade and Industry, and Education and Science. In his early years as an MP he had a reputation as being accident prone. The Birmingham Post once famously said of him that his “diplomatic skills make Colonel Gaddafi sound like Solomon”.

But he grew into the job, and although such gaffes as that Britain “would beat the Japanese industrially just as we had beaten them militarily”, or that “clergymen should give up politics for Lent” clung somewhat albatross-like to his person long after he had uttered them, those who worked with him admired his idealistic enthusiasm and his practical bent.

He had thoroughly mastered computers through working in industry before going into politics, and in Parliament he became a proselytiser for their use. His ideas for their application once he was in government seemed to some messianic, but they bore scrutiny and have become commonplace in today’s industrial ethos.

Many felt that he might well have gone farther than he did. As it was, he had gained the impression that by the late 1980s he was not in favour with Margaret Thatcher, and had no political future. The following year he became chairman of Texas Instruments, though he was to have another seven years in Parliament. When his Coventry South West seat disappeared in a boundary reorganisation for the 1997 general election, he was happy to leave Westminster and concentrate on his industrial interests.

John Patrick Butcher was born in 1946 and educated at Huntingdon Grammar School and Birmingham University, where he took a degree in politics and economics and was secretary of the Conservative association.

After graduating he spent the year 1967-68 at the Institute of Strategic Studies researching guerrilla warfare and then, for the next ten years, worked in the computer industry as a marketing executive and product manager at Singer-Friden, the Rank Organisation and as director of applied computer techniques at General Computer Systems (Datatext).

In the meantime his political life had begun in West Midlands local government, with his election to Birmingham City Council in 1972. He was to serve on the council for the next six years, during that time contesting the safe Labour seat of Birmingham Northfield at the general election of February 1974.

At the election of 1979 which resoundingly returned the Conservatives to power under Thatcher, he entered Parliament for Coventry South West, taking the seat from Labour’s Audrey Wise, after a campaign that was remarked for its American-style “on-air” campaigning.

He announced himself as a Thatcherite. “I believe in Grantham. By that I mean a meritocracy . . . equality of opportunity, not equality.” He also did not hesitate to declare himself a nationalist, “a much maligned word”, though this nationalism appeared to take on a somewhat restrictive trade union quality when he called for a ban on the import of Japanese car components and stigmatised the purchase of foreign cars as “an act of betrayal”.

His six years as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at Industry and then Trade and Industry from 1982 were characterised by a zeal for the West Midlands for which he was given special responsibility in 1983. One of his achievements was to establish the West Midlands Development Association. However, it took him some time to acquire political savvy and ministerial gravitas. Thus, when he castigated the North of England as being “workshy” at a time when the region was reeling under high unemployment, he was compelled to apologise publicly by his party leader.

He was on safer ground when his utterances drew on his own experience. In 1985 he criticised British industry for lurking far behind Germany in the technical training it offered its workforce, and announced a £3.5 million increase in spending on schools software.

He caused sharp intakes of breath within his party when he declared that the Handsworth riots that rocked Birmingham in September 1985 were nothing to do with unemployment but were a “celebration of lawlessness and anarchy”. But when the Government responded to Handsworth and a similar riot in Tottenham by setting up in 1986 inner-city task forces to try to tackle the problems, Butcher was given responsibility on the junior ministerial team.

After a brief period at the Department of Education and Science he retired to the back benches, from where, in the John Major years, he voiced his opposition to the EU.

After leaving Parliament he concentrated on a number of directorships as well as running several companies himself. He was also a visiting lecturer at Warwick University. One of his proudest achievements was a rock opera he composed while still in Parliament. He liked to describe it as inhabiting “that huge tract of land between Springsteen and Gershwin”.

John Butcher is survived by his wife Anne, and by their son and two daughters.

John Butcher, politician, was born on February 13, 1946. He died of a heart attack on December 25, 2006, aged 60