Kenneth Munro was one of that remarkable generation of Glasgow University students groomed for political life in the debating chamber of the University Union in the early 1960s: John Smith, Donald Dewar, John Mackay (Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish) Meta Ramsay (Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale, Neil McCormick and Menzies Campbell.

Munro was born in Glasgow and educated at Hutchesons’ Boys’ Grammar School. Leaving School in 1957 without the qualifications to enter Glasgow University, he spent two years’ National Service in the Intelligence Corps before spending a further two years working in his father’s store in Caledonia Road in the Gorbals and making sure he was able to go to Glasgow University, where he studied politics and economics, graduating with honours in 1963.

He joined the University’s Labour Club and held office each year until he became chairman in 1962. Never the sort of debater who would, like Smith or Dewar, win an Observer Mace, Munro learnt to master a brief in a way that, matched with his grasp of economics, was to be the foundation for his future career with the European Commission.

Ken Munro spent five years from 1969-74 as Industrial Relations Manager of the Ford Motor Company, the last two of which saw him seconded to the Pay Board. During this time he was a Labour member of Brentwood District Council in Essex. In 1974 he started working with the European Commission, and for most of the 1980s he was the Commission’s Press Officer and Deputy Head of its London Office. In 1988 he returned to Scotland and for the next ten years he was Head of the European Commission’s Representation in Scotland. Regularly appearing on radio and television to support or defend the European ideal and its economic instruments, Ken Munro began to relish not only working in Edinburgh but savouring the social and cultural life of the capital.

After he retired he continued to support the European movement as Convener of Scotland in Europe and Director of Our Europe, but threw himself into Edinburgh life. He was a member of the New Club, a patron of the Traverse Theatre, and a member of the Council of the Saltire Society and chairman of its International Committee, chairman of the Centre for Scottish Public Policy from 1997 and also for a time Convener of Children in Scotland. In 1999 he was appointed to the Royal Commission on the Reform of the House of Lords and in the same year became an approved Labour candidate for the Lothian list in the elections to the Scottish Parliament.

Munro remained very close to John Smith (he was Vice Chairman of the John Smith Memorial Trust) and to Donald Dewar, and their deaths profoundly affected him. The relationships he made during university days mattered enormously to him and meant that Scotland’s political, academic and legal establishment were frequent guests at his Morningside home, which, as Dewar said on the occasion of Munro’s retirement “was a long way from the single-end in Uist Street in Govan where he started married life”.

He is survived by his widow Elizabeth and by his two daughters.

Kenneth Munro, head of the European Commission in Scotland, 1988-1998, was born on December 17, 1936. He died of cancer on September 23, 2008, aged 71