For a brief period in his 32 years in Parliament Sir Anthony Kershaw was a junior minister under Ted Heath, but a natural modesty and politeness prevented him from pushing through the ambitious Westminster crowd to the front. So for most of his political career he remained a pillar of the back benches, although for eight years he was chairman of the influential House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs.

(John) Anthony Kershaw was born in 1915 in Cairo, the son of J. F. Kershaw, an appeal court judge, and his wife Anne from Kentucky. A natural sportsman, at prep school he was victor ludorum for four successive years and at Eton he shone at the wicket. Later he played in the House of Commons cricket team. He also played rugby for Harlequins. His time at boarding school was lonely. He returned to his parents in Egypt, then under British rule, only once a year and otherwise spent his holidays with his nanny in Fulham Palace Road, West London. His father, Jack, died when he was 13 and his elder brother, Overton, a Balliol man, was killed in an avalanche in the Pyrenees when Anthony was 15.

Anthony himself went up to Balliol College, Oxford, and was called to the Bar by Inner Temple in 1939, the same year that he was married to Barbara Crookenden.

In 1940, Kershaw was commissioned into the 16th/5th Queens Royal Lancers and took part with his regiment in Operation Torch, the Allied landings in French North Africa in November 1942. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commanding Axis forces in the Mediterranean, reacted quickly by sending a small force of seasoned troops to slow the Allied advance on Tunis. Key to this advance was the Kassarine Pass, 120 miles to the south-west, of which elements of the 10th Panzer Division had taken control on February 20, 1943.

By this time, Kershaw was a captain on the staff of 26th Armoured Brigade comprising his own regiment, the 17th/21st Lancers and two infantry battalions. Although the enemy had no intention of holding the pass for long, neither were they about to leave it without a stiff fight. Kershaw was responsible for issuing the brigade commander’s orders over the radio from the command tank, while the brigadier ranged forward in a scout car from where he had a better view. When the scout car radio failed, Kershaw ran forward under fire on several occasions to take the brigadier’s instructions, then back to his tank to issue them.

On February 22, when a German counter-attack appeared imminent, he continued to man his disabled tank so that its gun could be brought into action, despite the artillery fire to which it was vulnerable. He was awarded the Military Cross for his gallantry at Kassarine and later returned to England to attend the wartime short course at the staff college. During the invasion of Normandy and advance into Belgium he was the brigade major of an armoured brigade and, later, an instructor at the staff college. He was Colonel of the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars of the Territorial Army in the 1950s.

Kershaw entered public life in 1946 when he was elected a member of the London County Council, and in the following year he was elected to Westminster City Council. After fighting the customary two unwinnable parliamentary seats, he was elected Conservative MP for the Cotswold seat of Stroud in 1955 and continued to represent the constituency until 1987 during which time he increased his majority by some 20,000 votes.

He was parliamentary private secretary to Edward Heath from 1967 until 1970 in which year Heath appointed him Parliamentary Secretary for Public Building and Works. But he was switched to under secretary at the Foreign Office in October that year. He succeeded the disgraced Lord Lambton as Defence Under-Secretary for the RAF in June 1973 (Lambton had resigned over a scandal with a prostitute) but was dropped in January the following year.

Kershaw was one of a handful of Tory MPs who had voted for the abolition of capital punishment in a Commons vote in February 1956. By December 1964 many of his fellow Conservatives had caught up with him when it came to vote once more over the abolition of hanging. The Bill became law.

As chairman of the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, 1979-87, Kershaw opposed British taxpayers’ money being poured into the costly Fortress Falklands policy after the conflict with Argentina in 1982. He called for Argentina to be offered incentives and for a formal peace to be declared so that spending could be cut. He went on to chair a Commons inquiry into the controversial sinking of the Argentine crusier General Belgrano with the loss of 323 lives by the British submarine Conquerer. The inquiry found that the episode was militarily justified.

In 1980 Kershaw was accused of having put down 70 amendments to the Zoo Licensing Bill to prevent discussion of a Private Member’s Bill calling for all tobacco advertising to be banned. He was an adviser to the British-American Tobacco Company. Parliament finally banned tobacco advertising in the autumn of 2002.

Kershaw was a member of the executive of the Tories’ influential backbench 1922 Committee, 1983-87. He was vice-chairman of the British Council, 1974-87, and Vice Lord-Lieutenant of Gloucestershire, 1990-93.

In Sir Winston Churchill’s declining years, Kershaw was deputed to look after the frail wartime leader when he was in the House and sit with him in the Commons Library.

He was knighted in 1981.

Kershaw was a hard-working and diligent local representative who met his constituents at his Friday surgery on equal, non-judgmental terms and invariably found a way to solve their problems, however trivial.

His greatest passion was hunting — he rode with the Beaufort and the Berkeley hunts — together with shooting, stalking and gardening.

His manner was genial and tough, with a dash of Colonel Blimp. He never lost his enthusiasm for politics and remained dedicated to his constituency and devoted to his family.

He is survived by his wife and their two sons and two daughters.

Sir Anthony Kershaw, MC, politician, was born on December 14, 1915. He died on April 29, 2008, aged 92