Lord Beaumont of Whitley became the Green Party's only member of either House of Parliament in 1999 after spending most of his life and a good deal of his fortune helping the Liberal and then Liberal Democrat Party. In his long career he had alternated between the church and politics.

The motto on his coat of arms was “Ich kann nicht anders” - Martin Luther's declaration that he could not do otherwise. This led him first into the Anglican priesthood in the 1950s and then into party politics, resigning his orders in 1973 to devote himself entirely to the Liberals.

In the 1980s he felt a call to resume an active role in his Church and became a vicar for five years, during which time he thought it appropriate to sit on the cross benches. After he decided his pastoral role was over he returned to his party's benches. It surprised many when, in 1999, he left the Liberal Democrats, as his party had by then become, for Liberalism had been at the heart of his life for so long. But he had become convinced that the Greens' sense of priorities was needed if the earth was to survive.

Beaumont was a vicar in Hong Kong when his father died in 1958, leaving him a very considerable fortune derived originally from the Grace shipping empire in the United States. This enabled him on his return to England to publish magazines, finance plays and contribute generously to Liberal Party funds. Money, he used to say, was for spending, and this he proceeded to do. In 15 years he managed to dispose of most of his inheritance.

Timothy Wentworth Beaumont was educated at Gordonstoun and Christ Church, Oxford. After Westcott House, Cambridge, he was ordained in 1955 and went to Hong Hong as an assistant chaplain at St John's Cathedral before being appointed vicar of Christ Church, Kowloon.

Back in London he became an honorary curate at St Stephen's, Rochester Row, but he was an unusual curate. He danced the Twist, went to the races, bought his wife a racehorse, drove a Rolls-Royce, wore pink or strawberry coloured shirts and used his clerical collar only when officiating on Sundays. He lived in splendid houses in Mayfair and later in Hampstead.

But he was far from being just a playboy priest, as he used to be described by the tabloids. His Liberalism played as large a part in his life as his religious duties. At one point he was said to be giving £1,000 a month to his party's funds. His social conscience led him to call for “a really swingeing tax on inherited and gifted wealth”. Confronted with the apparent contradiction between his political views and his own wealth he replied: “Of course I have dispersed it already.”

He dispersed some of it by backing the Ikon Theatre Company, which produced plays at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Some of his publications made money but others lost a great deal. The losers included Time and Tide, a once-famous political weekly that he had to sell eventually to a right-wing publisher, and New Outlook, an independent Liberal monthly.

From the early 1960s he became an increasingly prominent Liberal. For a period he was the full-time head of the party organisation, working five days a week at the headquarters in Westminster and officiating as a curate on Sundays. He was honorary treasurer of the party, 1965-66, chairman, 1967-68, and president, 1969-70, then resigning his orders in 1973. In 1974, the year of the two general elections, he was chairman of the Liberals' election committee.

He had been made a life peer in 1967 and he spoke frequently in the Lords. He tried to outlaw the sale of drinks in non-returnable bottles and cans; to ban corporal punishment in schools for handicapped children; and to remove the charitable status of independent schools. He failed each time but his intentions made him a popular figure in the Lords.

As his fortune declined, he exchanged his Rolls-Royce for a Mini and moved to a modest semi-detached house in Clapham. When he was told that a house and grounds he had sold for £205,000 years before was about to reap a profit of £6.5 million for property companies he replied with typical resignation: “I don't say good luck to them, but I don't say bad luck either. As far as I am concerned, money is not a thing I sit tight on. I have given some away, lost some. It doesn't worry me.”

In 1984 he decided that the time had come to resume orders, and became parish priest of St Philip's and St Luke's at Kew. He grew a beard and spent several fruitful years there before deciding that his work had run its course.

He returned to the Lords as an active Liberal Democrat. In 1999, however, he joined the Greens. Typically he was not a passive convert, but preached the Green gospel, arguing against globalisation, pleading for a curb on the growth in aviation and demanding a better deal for the Greens in election broadcasts. In April 2002 he initiated the Green Party's first parliamentary debate by proposing that Railtrack should be renationalised.

Over the years he took a lively part in the assemblies of the Council of Europe and the WEU. He was founder-director of the Green Alliance, chairman the voluntary euthanasia society Exit, a member of the executive committe of the British Council, president of the British Federation of Film Societies and treasurer of Church Action on Poverty.

He married in 1955 Mary Rose Wauchope. She survives him, with a son and two daughters; a son predeceased him.

Lord Beaumont of Whitley, priest and politician, was born on November 22, 1928. He died on April 8, 2008, aged 79