Richard Holme enjoyed a remarkably full and varied public career. He was a president of the Liberal Party, a key adviser to David Steel and Paddy Ashdown, a lifelong campaigner for constitutional reform, vice-chairman of the Independent Television Commission, chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Commission and director of numerous businesses. Added to these were various pro bono activities.

His quick mind and drive enabled him to handle a portfolio of activities covering politics, academe and publishing — he was easily bored, so the variety helped to stimulate him. In politics, business and lobbying he was a skilled fixer, knowing with whom to have a word and how to coax factions to a compromise. His interest in political strategy also recommended him to party leaders. His great energy and habit of rising at 5 am helped him to achieve so much. He praised the benefits of his early-morning swim at the RAC Club which always gave him an advantage at working breakfasts with later-rising companions.

Holme was born in 1936 in London. His father, a Freemason, died during the war and Richard boarded at the Royal Masonic School in Bushey, Hertfordshire. Following military action with the Gurkhas in Malaysia between 1954 and 1956 (a legacy of which was an increasing deafness in his right ear in later life), he went up to St John’s College, Oxford, to read jurisprudence. He joined both the Labour and the Liberal Societies at university but found the latter more to his liking.

Holme was one of the “stars” in a party that had few MPs or national figures. In 1966, aged 30, he was made vice-chairman of the party’s executive and two years later he and David Steel founded the Radical Action Movement to promote progressive politics, a lifelong passion. He served as the party’s president, 1980-81.

His main role, however, was as chief adviser to the Liberal leader David Steel, and, from 1988, to the Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown. For nearly two decades he was a key figure in shaping the third party’s political strategy, drafting speeches and papers for the leaders and briefing commentators. Both men shared his interest in realignment; the first achieved an alliance and then a merger with the Social Democrats, the second achieved co-operation with Tony Blair’s new Labour.

Party activists complained that Holme as well as Steel and Ashdown were too ready to compromise party principles for a whiff of power and that he was an unelected and unaccountable power broker. His acknowledgement that his long and close relationship with the leaders sometimes made it difficult to tell the leader and the adviser apart, prompted a friend to comment: “Richard, that is why we have to change leaders from time to time.” When Ashdown retired as leader in 1999, Holme also stepped back from his advisory role; he rightly suspected that the new leader, Charles Kennedy, had less interest in political ideas and strategy than his predecessors. Although a dedicated Liberal, he realised that the party’s future lay in a realignment of the Centre Left. He and Steel encouraged Roy Jenkins and other disillusioned Labour MPs to form the Social Democratic Party rather than join the Liberals in 1981 as a means of strengthening what he called “the progressive centre”. At a conference in Germany he was a moving spirit behind, and author of, the Königswinter Compact of April 5, 1981, in which David Steel, Holme and the Social Democrats Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers set out the terms on which the parties might co-operate. He was a forceful advocate of the merger of the two parties in 1988.

He failed to win a parliamentary seat, but not for want of trying. He fought East Grinstead in 1964 and in a by-election the following year. He was abroad during the 1970 and February 1974 general elections managing a publishing company in California. He was a disappointing third in Braintree in October 1974. He had good prospects in Cheltenham in 1983 and 1987 and worked hard in the constituency. He finished a strong second both times, the later time as an Alliance candidate, and at that point decided to retire from the quest for a seat. There were, inevitably, other interests and claims on his time, including forming the Green Alliance, a cross-party environmental group, and the Constitutional Reform Centre. He was one of the founders of the Charter 88 cross-party campaigning group.

He was not lost to Liberal Democrat politics, however. In 1990 he was awarded a life peerage, the first given to the party for ten years; Margaret Thatcher had for years rebuffed their recommendations. He combined his role as party spokesman on Northern Ireland in the Lords with his business interests, overseeing the party’s 1992 general election manifesto, and from 1994 directing the Liberal Democrats’ preparation for the general election campaign. He took pride in the party’s more than doubling its number of MPs in the 1997 election. He was closely involved in the secret pre-election negotiations between Tony Blair and Ashdown to increase co-operation between the two parties. He also served as a member of the Joint Constitutional Cabinet Committee that Blair established in 1997 and was made a Privy Counsellor in 2000.

Outside politics, his first employment had been with Unilever and then Cavenham Foods, before he found his métier in publishing. He spent two crucial years with Penguin; his successes included acquiring the rights to The Forsyte Saga and launching the books to coincide with the television series. He was chairman of the Threadneedle Publishing Company and then of Dods Publishing and Research for ten years from 1988. Between 1995 and 1998 he was an executive director of RTZ, later Rio Tinto. In 2002 he became chairman of the ISG Group, an environmental company based in California.

His intellect and wide reading combined with his practical experience made him a draw at academic conferences. At ease in academe, he was a visiting professor in business at Middlesex Polytechnic, an associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford, and a co-founder and chairman of the English College in Prague from 1994. He served as chairman of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government, 2001-07, and in 1998 became chancellor of Greenwich University. He also wrote books and articles, making the case for constitutional reform and for corporate social responsibility, particularly on green issues.

Tall, handsome, with a military moustache and immaculately attired, he was easily recognisable in any gathering. The smooth manner and assured chairmanship of meetings did not mean that he was a “yes man”. He had a clear sense of direction in business and politics.

In October 2000, when a tabloid recounted lurid details of an extra-marital affair, he immediately resigned his chairmanship of the Broadcasting Standards Commission. He likened the exposure of the affair to “reading your own obituary, while you are still alive”.

In 2007 brain cancer was diagnosed. Although given a short time to live, he battled on and, though gradually shedding responsibilities, continued to be chairman of the House of Lords Constitution Committee until his term ended in October 2007.His wife and four children survive him.

Lord Holme of Cheltenham, politician and businessman, was born on May 27, 1936. He died of cancer on May 4, 2008, aged 71