The Earl of Crawford and Balcarres

Tory defence minister, and last survivor of the 1955 Commons intake, who also served as Lord Chamberlain to the Queen Mother

THE 29th EARL OF CRAWFORD AND 12th EARL OF BALCARRES, Premier Earl of Scotland and head of the House of Lindsay, who has died aged 96, was a liberal Tory who made a rich contribution to the Commons (as Lord Balniel), Edward Heath’s government, the Lords, the Royal Household, the boardroom and the fields of conservation and mental health.

He was also the last surviving member of the House elected in 1955.

His oldest Scottish title – Lord Lindsay of Crawford – predates 1143, but he owed his right to sit in the Lords, until Tony Blair’s cull of hereditaries, to the English Barony of Wigan. His father, the 28th and

11th Earl, had to sell Haigh Hall, near Wigan, because of “penal taxation”; Crawford himself lived in Fife and Hampstead.

Until he succeeded his father in 1975, Lord Balniel was a career politician. Highly rated as a minister, he was unlucky not to have served in Heath’s Cabinet. Helped in securing his seat at Hertford by his uncle Lord Salisbury being the constituency chairman, he held it at five elections despite an influx of Labour-voting new-town tenants.

Balniel was an effective Opposition spokesman on social security, demolishing Richard Crossman’s plan for a national superannuation scheme. As a minister of state – for defence and at the Foreign Office – he proved a master of detail, unfazed by the rough-and-tumble of the Commons.

Defeated in 1974, he accepted a life peerage and joined the Opposition front bench in the Lords. But within a year his father died, and he left active politics.

He went on to chair, in turn, the Historic Buildings Council for Scotland, the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland.

A dancing partner of Princess Margaret in his youth, who rode in the third Royal carriage at Ascot, Crawford also became First Crown Estate Commissioner, then Lord Chamberlain to the Queen Mother for the final decade of her life. He engineered the removal of her Treasurer, Sir Ralph Anstruther, who had long been incapable of performing his duties.

Robert Alexander Lindsay (always known in the family as Robin) was born in London on March 5 1927, the elder son of the 28th and 11th Earl and the former Mary Cavendish.

Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, he served with the Grenadier Guards from 1945 to 1949, mainly in the Middle East. After a spell at the British Embassy in Paris, he joined the Conservative Research Department in 1952.

Three years later Balniel was chosen to fight the new constituency of Hertford, which included Lord Salisbury’s Hatfield House. He was not expected to win because of new-town development at Hatfield and Welwyn, but romped home by 5,984 votes.

In the Commons he predicted that if Britain let slip her influence in Cyprus, Turkish paratroops would land – as happened in 1974.

Henry Brooke, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, made Balniel – a constituent – his PPS. When Brooke became Minister of Housing, Balniel led a deputation of angry Hampstead residents to him after high winds tore the roofs off their new houses.

From 1959, Balniel chaired his party’s social services committee. His protests at powers in a Bill enabling disciplinary bodies for professions supplementary to medicine to subpoena witnesses led Rab Butler to announce an inquiry. He fared less well with the transport minister Ernest Marples, who refused to see him about a “bloodstained” stretch of the A1.

Balniel campaigned for better polio vaccines, backed Anthony Wedgwood Benn’s call for peers to be able to renounce their titles – as one of five heirs on the Tory benches – and refused to support Harold Macmillan’s Commonwealth Immigrants Bill. In 1963 he was elected to the 1922 committee executive.

In 1964, he intervened with Sir Alec Douglas-home to save Gilbert Scott’s Foreign Office from demolition. He wrote to the prime minister: “No government of a really civilised country can pull down one of its finest buildings without being censured for barbarism. For heaven’s sake, stop whichever asses propose this.”

He showed less judgment asking Barbara Cartland to deputise for him at a hustings at Welwyn. She brought the meeting to a standstill by claiming Harold Wilson had “skeletons in his cupboard”.

In defeat, Sir Alec brought Balniel on to the front bench. Heath, succeeding Home a year later, made him a foreign affairs spokesman.

As chairman of the National Association for Mental Health, Balneil pressed in 1966 for an inquiry into Scientology. He was at first rebuffed, but in 1969 Sir John Foster QC was appointed to probe the Church.

When Balniel gave up the association’s chair the following year, the Scientologists’ spokesman David Gaiman tried to take over.

In a libel action by the Scientologists against their local MP Geoffrey Johnson Smith, it was disclosed that the movement’s founder L Ron Hubbard had ordered: “Get detectives on to that lord’s past to unearth the tit-bits. They are there.”

In 1967 Heath promoted Balniel – with Margaret Thatcher – to the Shadow Cabinet, giving him the social services brief. He proposed merging the departments of Health and Social Services, an idea soon adopted by Labour.

He denounced Crossman’s plans for earnings-related pensions as a “skilful fraud”, and led the charge after Crossman – to Labour fury – announced higher NHS charges on the day of the 1969 council elections. Balniel admitted he had underestimated Crossman’s ability to cause chaos.

While Heath was not expected to win the 1970 election, it was assumed that if he did, Balniel would become Social Services Secretary. The job went to Sir Keith Joseph, however, and Balniel became Minister of State for Defence, answering in the Commons for Lord Carrington.

His consolation was that both Carrington and his colleague Ian Gilmour were fellow Grenadiers.

Balniel started in Northern Ireland, watching Royal Engineers reinforce Belfast’s “peace line” after riots. In July 1971 Bernadette Devlin accused him in the House of lying on the Army’s behalf over charges that it was murdering people in Derry; no one had the energy to move her suspension.

He hit back at Senator Edward Kennedy’s call for an end to rule by “bayonet and bloodshed”, and claimed that with 100 terrorists arrested each week, the IRA was “being defeated”.

Visiting that year’s Paris Air Show, Balniel forsook his RAF transport for a 1932 Morane fighter trainer, owned and flown by his brother, Patrick Lindsay.

He also – after financial demands from Malta’s Dom Mintoff led to the withdrawal of British forces – had to field questions about removal costs for polo ponies.

Balniel came in for heavy criticism after “Bloody Sunday”, January 30 1972, when 13 rioters in Derry were killed by paratroops. He coupled his announcement of an inquiry with a restatement of the Army’s claim that troops had been fired upon; while the inquiry would establish the facts, he said, he had to give the Army’s account of events to offset lies peddled by the IRA. Labour MPS accused him of pre-empting the tribunal.

Now a privy counsellor, Balniel moved that November to the Foreign Office. He surprised some Tories by urging British firms in South Africa to pay their non-white workers more, and had misgivings over expelling the inhabitants of Diego Garcia to make way for an American base.

But his main concern was the Middle East, where efforts to broker a settlement had stalled.

He visited Arab capitals urging flexibility; the Israeli premier Golda Meir pressed him to get the Arabs to talk to Israel direct. (He also protested to Israel that their commandos who raided Beirut had been issued with fake British passports.) His initiative was ended by Egypt’s attack on Israeli-occupied Sinai that October.

Balniel held the new – and on paper even less winnable – seat of Welwyn and Hatfield in the February 1974 election, which Heath lost. He served as a foreign affairs spokesman until being narrowly ousted that October by Labour’s Helene Middleweek (now Baroness Hayman).

Taking his life peerage as Baron Balniel, he scorned Labour’s referendum on continued EEC membership as an “abomination”. Then that December his father died and politics took a back seat; instead, Crawford, as he now was, chaired the Lombard North Central Bank, and became a director of Natwest and Sun Alliance.

On the Balcarres estate he had overseen the construction in the mid-1960s, to the designs of the Modernist architect Trevor Dannatt, of Pitcorthie House. His wife transformed the gardens.

He became a keen collector of contemporary art and developed an interest in antiquarian books, buying the great Scottish poet Hugh Macdiarmid’s personal collection.

In 1988, furious that Manchester University planned to sell a manuscript collection donated by the 26th Earl in 1900, he offered to loan them his own Audubon’s Birds of America if they sold their copy instead of the Crawford collection. When they refused, he removed 40,000 of his books from the university.

Crawford was created a Knight of the Thistle in 1996, and appointed GCVO in 2002. For 27 years he was Deputy Lieutenant for Fife.

He married, in 1949, Ruth Meyer of Zurich; she died in 2021. They had two sons and two daughters. He is succeeded as 30th and 13th Earl by his elder son, Lord Balniel, born in 1958.

The 29th Earl of Crawford and 12th Earl of Balcarres, born March 5 1927, died March 18 2023