Sir John Peel was a One Nation Tory of the old school, who combined a patriotic belief in the great achievements of the British Empire with a conviction that Britain should play a strong role in Europe. He believed that politics was about public service, and that loyalty was a paramount virtue.

His early career was in the Colonial Service, following in the footsteps of his father, Sir William Peel, who had been Chief Secretary of the Federated Malay States and Governor of Hong Kong. But Peel was captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore, and spent three and a half years as a prisoner of war, including seven months on the Thailand-Burma railway. On his return to Britain he became Conservative MP for Leicester South-East, 1957-74, and was a member of the first British delegation to the European Parliament in 1973-74, and president of both the North Atlantic Assembly and the parliamentary assembly of the Western European Union in 1972.

William John Peel was born in 1912. He attended Wellington College and Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he read law and played hockey for the University Wanderers. After being selected for the Colonial Civil Service in 1933 he attended the postgraduate course for colonial cadets at New College, Oxford.

His first postings were in the Malayan Civil Service, Taiping and Kuala Lumpur, where he played hockey at the Selangor Club (he subsequently captained the Malay national team as centre-half). He was then sent as assistant district officer to the Cameron Highlands, before being transferred to the Malayan establishment office in Singapore, as adjutant dealing with all personnel appointments, in 1939.

It was on a trip home to visit his father in the late 1930s that it first occurred to Peel that the British Empire he served might not even last his lifetime. “My father said, ‘Surely you do not think the Empire will last for ever?’ You could have knocked me down with a feather. I was very patriotic and I just assumed it would,” he said.

Signs of waning British power came swiftly. The dramatic fall of Singapore to the Japanese in February 1942 took many in the British colony, and in Britain, by surprise — but not Peel, who had been privy to confidential intelligence about the indefensibility of the island. He had been commissioned into the Straits Settlements Volunteer Force in 1941, later receiving a commission in the British Army as a liaison officer at HQ Malaya Command. His wife and two daughters managed to escape to South Africa on the troopship Duchess of Bedford, which had just landed the last British reinforcements. Those troops barely fired a shot in anger, and went almost straight into Japanese captivity.

Peel became a prisoner of war in Changi military camp, before being sent to Thailand as part of H Force to work on the Burma-Thailand railway. As the last substantial group of prisoners to make that journey, the members of H force were treated with particular brutality by their Japanese captors. Of 3,270 men sent out in May 1943, barely 500 were still standing by the end of August. Peel suffered from jungle ulcers, which were cured with an early treatment of penicillin, but he saw with horror the devastation wreaked by cholera on the camps of the Asian labourers.

By the time he was liberated from Changi jail, to which he had been returned, he weighed less than 6st. His knowledge of life in tropical conditions, and his ability to speak Malay had been important factors in his survival. On his release, he remembered with emotion, his Chinese servant bicycled the 16 miles from Singapore to Changi to present him with a basket of fruit.

His first posting after the war was as British resident in the sultanate of Brunei, where the discovery of gas by the Shell oil company was just beginning to be exploited. He re-established the British administration, partly thanks to the efforts of his top Brunei civil servant, who had successfully hidden all the official files from the Japanese forces throughout their occupation.

He also began a lifelong friendship with Omar Ali Saifuddin, who succeeded as Sultan after the death of his elder brother, and who proved to be much more favourably disposed towards his British “protectors”. Towards the end of his life he appointed Peel as Dato, an honorary member of the Brunei nobility.

In 1948 Peel was appointed Resident Commissioner to the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in the Pacific, the “Pattern of Islands” made famous by Sir Arthur Grimble in his memoirs. But despite the idyllic setting, it required a seven-week journey to get home — via a phosphate boat from Ocean Island to Australia — and when the British Labour Government introduced income tax for its colonial servants, Peel thought it no longer worth the disruption to his family life. When he was offered alternative jobs in St Helena or Grenada, he decided that the twilight of the Empire was approaching rapidly.

Back in Britain he briefly entered industry, working for Sir Halford Reddish, the autocratic boss of Rugby Portland Cement, before being persuaded to try politics by his friend and mentor, Lord Selborne. He stood unsuccessfully as Tory candidate in Meriden at the general election of 1955, and then won a by- election in Leicester South-East in 1957, after the resignation of Captain Charles Waterhouse over the invasion of Suez.

Peel’s first appointment was as parliamentary private secretary to Freddie Erroll, first at the Treasury and then the Board of Trade, before he was made a junior whip in 1960. He became a full-time whip and Lord Commissioner of the Treasury in 1961.

Peel’s real political hero in the 1960s was the now unfashionable figure of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, in whom he saw the loyalty, integrity and devotion to public service that he believed were essential to political life. Subsequently, as a long-serving member of the UK parliamentary delegation to the Council of Europe and the Western European Union, he became a close friend and loyal lieutenant to Lord Crathorne.

In the WEU he saw the opportunity for Britain to build the links it needed to the six member states of the Common Market, after President de Gaulle had vetoed British entry in 1963. He believed that in cultivating political contacts with the Continent, Britain could lessen its isolation and prepare the way for eventual membership.

At the same time, Peel was a passionate Atlanticist and a keen advocate of the closest possible links to the US in the Nato alliance. He was a scathing critic of the Soviet system, declaring towards the end of his life, when invited to visit Mikhail Gorbachev’s Moscow: “I have never been in a communist country, and I do not intend to start now.”

In 1972 he became president simultaneously of the North Atlantic Assembly — the parliamentary body behind Nato — and the WEU Assembly, combining Britain and the Common Market six. In this way he sought to reinforce the ties between these two defence- focused bodies.

When British membership of the Common Market was finally achieved in January 1973, Peel was knighted along with five other pro-European Tories, and became a nominated member of the European Parliament. But his Leicester constituency at Westminster was redistributed the following year, so he was obliged to step down.

In retirement, he continued to pursue his twin enthusiasms of European and Commonwealth engagement. He was chairman of the Victoria League for Commonwealth Friendship (as his father had been before him). He was also Master of the Worshipful Company of Framework Knitters in 1983, maintaining contacts with many of his former constituents in Leicester.

He is survived by his wife, Rosemary, whom he married in 1936, and their son and three daughters.

Sir John Peel, politician, was born on June 16, 1912. He died on May 8, 2004, aged 91.