Although never more than a politician of the second rank, John Biffen enjoyed an enviable reputation with members of almost all parties. Widely regarded as the most popular and successful Leader of the House of Commons since the war, he was recognised as an independent-minded, radical Tory of great charm and modesty.

He was first returned to Parliament in November 1961, after the previous MP for Oswestry, David Ormsby-Gore, was appointed by Harold Macmillan to be British Ambassador in Washington. At the selection conference in the constituency which the future Lord Harlech had represented for a dozen years, the young Biffen — who had been a lance-corporal during his National Service — defeated the notorious Major James Friend (the toast of the League of Empire Loyalists) and a brace of Tory colonels. In the Conservative Party of those days, that was no mean achievement. Biffen, a member of the Bow Group, entered the Commons at the age of 31.

But there was an even greater irony in his being chosen for this primarily agricultural seat. At the selection conference he was the only one of the four contenders to fully endorse the Macmillan Government’s pending application to join the European Economic Community. It was not long, however, before he changed into one of the strongest Tory Eurosceptics.

Biffen — with, as a friend once put it, “his head in the clouds and his feet very much in the mud of North Shropshire” — insisted on remaining his own man throughout his long parliamentary career. His love of the soil he probably derived from Stanley Baldwin but his support for an old-fashioned form of nationalism was inspired by Enoch Powell, for whom his admiration bordered on idolatry.

A Cabinet Minister for the first eight years of the Thatcher Government, Biffen was sacked in 1987 from his post as Leader of the House in a particularly chilly interview with Mrs Thatcher, who had earlier resorted to insult at second-hand by encouraging her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, to describe him publicly as “semi-detached”. There was, though, some truth in the charge. Biffen had long since tired of Margaret Thatcher’s imperious ways and, upon his discharge, made his disapproval evident: “I am not in business to make life easy for Mrs Thatcher,” he once said. He also described her regime as “Stalinist”.

Such an outburst from so normally cool a character came as a surprise. (Later, with similar hyperbole, he was to describe Ingham as “the sewer not the sewage”.) But this kind of invective, however sharp the provocation, was unworthy of Biffen, who was a man of sweet nature, generous to his friends and invariably courteous to his political opponents. He had largely won his reputation as a House of Commons man par excellence by his humour and unfailing good manners.

William John Biffen was born near Bridgwater in Somerset, the only child of William Victor Biffen, tenant farmer of 300 acres near the village of Combwich. His mother, who had come to the farm as a maid and then married her employer, had a great influence upon her son. Biffen once described her as combining “a strong sympathy for the poor” with “a strong sense of property”. She died, an old lady, in the early 1990s. It was said that his father and mother played cribbage every day of their married lives.

The young Biffen had an untypical upbringing for a future Tory Cabinet Minister. He went to the Combwich Village School (“He were clever,” was the oft-expressed view of a local fisherman), and then on to Dr Morgan’s Grammar School in Bridgwater, where he was encouraged to study history by an inspired schoolmaster, Jack Lawrence. Although hopeless at games, he was made head boy.

He then won an open scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he took a first in both parts of the history tripos. He was elected chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association, though unlike members of the later generation of the Cambridge Tory mafia, such as Kenneth Clarke and Michael Howard, he failed to become president of the Union. On finishing at Cambridge, he was offered graduate places at Yale and Cornell but could not raise the funds to take advantage of them. In 1953 he became, instead, a graduate trainee with Tube Investments in Birmingham.

He rented a flat in Erdington, which he shared with several of his friends. He used to delight in peeling potatoes for supper as soon as he arrived back from work. He would do so in his overcoat — a garment from which he derived a good deal of comfort in sub-Arctic conditions. Later he moved into a similar establishment in the Fulham Road (he was then working for the Economist Intelligence Unit), a flat which became a place of refuge for many “visiting firemen” who slept in his “dormitory”. He continued to peel potatoes, and to devote his leisure time to reading The Economist and Playboy.

His first foray into politics was not at Oswestry but at the general election of 1959 when he fought Richard Crossman at Coventry East. Crossman thought him the most formidable opponent he had ever had, but that did not save Biffen him from losing handsomely. Once he had been elected in 1961 for Oswestry, a somewhat dull railway town surrounded by lovely countryside, Biffen, always his own man, remained stranded on the backbenches — with one short exception — until the election as leader of the party of Margaret Thatcher.

His espousal of “Powellite” causes, stopping short only of his hero’s views on race, did not endear him either to Harold Macmillan or to Edward Heath, though Sir Alec Douglas-Home did briefly appoint him Technology spokesman under Ernest Marples in 1965. It was not a role in which he lingered long, resigning soon after Heath became leader, and pleading ill-health (though the real reason was his total temperamental incompatibility with Marples). Heath, however, thought him guilty of “a lack of moral fibre” and, significantly, Biffen remained on the back benches throughout the period of the Heath Government from 1970 to 1974.