RONALD BUTT was a scholar-journalist, for 35 years a national political commentator of a thoughtful but deeply felt conservatism. He was born in 1920, and grew up in South London; before the outbreak of war he held pacifist views and had to wrestle with his conscience before deciding to join the Army.

He took part in the Normandy campaign after D-Day and finished his service in the Army Intelligence Corps. After the war he went up to St Catherine’s College, Oxford, where he read history. He stayed at Oxford doing postgraduate work and thought of making academic life his career, but decided to join the Financial Times in 1951.

At that time the Financial Times was hiring a number of young graduates to whom it gave their first opportunity in journalism. That remarkable journalist Sir Gordon Newton was the Editor: among the young graduates were Nigel Lawson, Samuel Brittan, Shirley Williams and William Rees-Mogg; somewhat older was the wartime generation of John Appleby, who became deputy editor of The Daily Telegraph, and Andrew Stonfield, the foreign editor. Ronald Butt fitted extremely well into this group of rather academic journalists.

Gordon Newton tried to train him as a straightforward financial journalist. He was, for a while, the commodities correspondent, in a period when commodities were more glamorous investment vehicles than they are today. Butt constructed a sensitive commodities index on the best arithmetic principles; he was rather nettled, though secretly amazed, when the index line turned out to be completely flat month after month. The index had to be reconstructed on a cruder mathematical model.

It was when he succeeded Paul Einzig as the political correspondent in the late 1950s that Butt really found his metier in journalism. He remained with the Financial Times as political correspondent and political editor until 1967, when he was persuaded by Harold Evans to join The Sunday Times as an assistant editor and political commentator; he also wrote a political column for The Times from 1968 to 1991, and was an associate editor of The Times from 1983 to 1985.

His political journalism covered the whole period from the resignation of Anthony Eden to the rise of John Major. He always wrote about British politics from an historical point of view and saw Parliament as the central institution, as the stage of legitimate authority on which the political actors had to perform. His first book, published in 1967, was The Power of Parliament, a study regarded at the time as being one of the most important since the end of the war. This was followed by his excellent A History of Parliament: the Middle Ages, which was published in 1989. For the past ten years Butt had been working on a second volume of the work.

A freelance article, which was published in The Spectator in May 1997, argued the case for Parliament, as opposed to the constitutional reforms proposed by what was then the new Blair administration. Its final paragraph read: “If the Blair government damages the economy, that can be put right. But if it weakens our parliamentary constitution the harm could be irreparable.”

Ronald Butt was never a fashionable political journalist, and did not wish to be; indeed Harold Evans sometimes fretted that his views were not fashionable enough. From the beginning to the end of his writing career, he stuck by his moderate but firmly constitutional convictions. He was rare among his contemporaries in political journalism in being a declared Conservative, at least to the extent of becoming and remaining a member of the Carlton Club, but he had never thought of becoming a politician himself.

Not surprisingly, he appreciated the Conservative politicians who most shared his view of the world, men like Sir Alec Douglas-Home on the front benches, or Sir Rhodes Boyson on the back benches. Again these were not the fashionable heroes of other journalists. He understood and admired the work of Margaret Thatcher, and some of his best writing was about her policies.

Butt was much concerned with the moral issues of politics. From an early stage he saw Mary Whitehouse not as a figure of fun, but as a serious woman campaigning for what she believed in. He saw many of the reforms of the permissive era as attacking the family, and therefore as hostile to the good society. He had for the past 30 years been involved with Family and Youth Concern, of which he had latterly been been a trustee. He was appointed CBE in 1987.

Butt himself was very much a family man; his marriage to Margaret Chaundy, the daughter of a mathematics don at Christ Church, Oxford, was a very happy one. He was devoted to her and to his two sons and two daughters, by all of whom he is survived.

Ronald Butt, CBE, journalist and author, was born on February 17, 1920. He died on December 13, 2002, aged 82.