Although he was a convinced Thatcherite, Richard Alexander, MP for Newark from 1979 to 1997, became a determined opponent of his party’s policy of pit closures. His constituency was heavily affected by the policy and in the early 1990s he spoke out against the “devastation” that he thought would result from Michael Heseltine’s plans to close 31 pits.

He was a serial rebel on the issue, and explained before one vote in 1993 how he could not bring himself to vote for a policy that would throw hundreds of his constituents out of work. “The heartbreak and uncertainty is too much.”

Richard Thain Alexander was born in Aberdeen in 1934 the son of an architect, Richard Alexander. He attended Dewsbury Grammar School and University College London, where he read law. He formed a law firm, Jones, Alexander, in 1964 and remained a partner there until 1984, when he became a consultant to it.

Before his entry into Parliament in 1979, when he overturned the 5,000- vote majority of the popular Labour MP Ted Bishop, he spent several years in Nottinghamshire local government.

In Parliament he served on select committees on agriculture, statutory instruments and the environment. Unusually for a Tory loyalist, Alexander stood by the miners — his constituency included the 800-strong Bevercotes colliery — leading a rearguard action against the pit closures by voting six times against the Government. This brought him no closer to the Left, however, whom he had a habit of baiting.

During the Falklands war he asked the Attorney-General to prosecute the Labour MP Tony Benn for saying that soldiers had signed up to escape the dole. Alexander called it “a prima facie case of treason and sedition”. And in 1984 he attacked the scruffiness of leftwingers: “I find a dark leather jacket, as worn by some leftwingers, unacceptable.” He also strongly disapproved of their dark glasses, open-neck shirts and safari-type suits which, he said, showed their wearers’ vest.

The newspapers had fun with this, as they did with an incident during the 1981 Bobby Sands crisis, when army bomb disposal experts were called to explode a rattling package that Alexander had received, perhaps, police thought, by supporters of the hunger striker Sands. In fact, it was an alarm clock that Alexander had left at a hotel.

Scandal hit Alexander in 1989 when his law practice was heavily criticised by a judge and told to pay £425,000 in damages to a client, Mrs Dickinson, for mishandling her divorce case. The settlement nearly ruined Alexander, who was forced to pay some of it from his own pocket.

In the late 1980s Alexander moved into consultancy for various firms including, controversially, Rindalbourne, which traded with Romania and sent a number of delegations to meet the country’s leader, Nicolae Ceausescu.

After four successive election wins, Alexander was swept away by the 1997 swing to Labour. Alexander went into retirement, returning to local government in Nottinghamshire.

He is survived by a son and a daughter by his first wife, Valerie Ann Winn, and by his second wife, Pat Henson.

Richard Alexander, MP for Newark 1979-1997, was born on June 19, 1934. He died of cancer on April 20, 2008, aged 73