Conservative cabinet minister who was never 'one of us' in the Thatcher years
The former Conservative cabinet minister Tony Newton, who has died aged 74 after a long illness, was a walking contradiction of the cynical mantra that politicians are all in it for themselves. To the Guardian's Hugo Young, Newton was "a good man, quite outside the nasty brigade," and to Ruth Lister, of the Child Poverty Action Group, "the best health and social security minister of the Thatcher years". From the presidency of the Oxford Union in 1959 until his life peerage made him Lord Newton of Braintree in 1997, he was a quiet, technocratic, slightly worried and very conscientious full-time professional.
He entered the Commons as MP for Braintree, Essex, in the February 1974 general election, which the Conservatives lost. After Margaret Thatcher led the party back into government in 1979, he served as a whip till going to the Department of Health and Social Security as a parliamentary under-secretary in 1982. He had responsibility for people with disabilities (1983-84), combined that brief with social security as minister of state (1984-86), and then took charge of health (1986-88). His care, expertise, and dedication were widely acknowledged and he forged excellent relations with Norman Fowler, just above him in government, and John Major, just below.
In 1988 he reached the cabinet as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, speaking in the Commons for the trade minister, Lord Young of Graffham, and co-ordinating inner-city policy before returning, the following year, to familiar ground as the newly autonomous secretary of state for social security after John Moore lost his way and was dismissed.
Both health and social security were tricky fiefdoms in the most rightwing government since the 1920s. Accordingly, Newton won some and lost some. Across that time he could claim a £20 a week additional benefit for people with severe disabilities; he found £10m for haemophiliacs infected with HIV/Aids after a six-month ministerial struggle; and he put a limit – still high – on the hours worked by junior doctors in hospitals.
Though he was under orders from Thatcher not to stress poverty as an issue, when he lost the argument over frozen child benefit it stressed itself. Also, whatever the precise division of responsibility, it was on his watch that, surreptitiously, the mis-selling of pensions by commercial companies began.
Under the far more congenial Major, Newton continued at social security until 1992, when he was made leader of the House and lord president. It was another ungrateful post, where he and the chief whip, Richard Ryder, would struggle with the fallout from enforced devaluation and exit from the European exchange rate mechanism (ERM).
The combination of sabotage from rightwing backbenchers over the Maastricht Treaty, the strange course of Michael Portillo's career and Thatcher's vengeful disloyalty, all this with a small, dwindling majority, made it a difficult time. Along with continual headlines about various forms of Tory bad behaviour, Newton had to contend with the possibility that Major's affair with Edwina Currie might become public knowledge: he was the one colleague in whom they had been obliged to confide, and the matter remained secret till Currie revealed it in a book. Through all this, Newton served with courtesy, patience, a steady nerve and perhaps a streak of fatalism, only to be rewarded with the loss of Braintree in 1997.
This least celebrity-like of politicians was born in the Essex port town of Harwich, and was educated at Friends' school, Saffron Walden, and Trinity College, Oxford, from which he graduated with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics. In 1960 he went to Conservative central office, where he stayed for 14 years, becoming head of its economics section in 1965, then assistant director of the research department in 1970, collecting an OBE at the age of 35. After slotting in the required unwinnable contest, Sheffield Brightside, in 1970, he was elected for Braintree, a contest of high earnestness, beating Keith Kyle of the Economist and Labour.
Once in parliament, he had to adjust to a kind of rightwing politics that was no part of his background. He never pretended to be a Thatcherite, voted against capital punishment, opposed beating in schools and was never, in Thatcher's terms, "one of us". But benefiting from his considerable grasp of detail, taste for hard work and disinclination for conspiracy, he quietly rose, then rose again.
As a backbencher, he urged humanitarian and rather interventionist causes: the holding down of VAT on electrical repairs, a higher tax allowance for pensioners, plus tax relief for blind people and on travel to work costs. A private member's bill proposed the continuation of a disabled person's mobility allowance after retirement. Being a technician, he was also co-opted to the party's study group on VAT. In the Lords, he worked on a number of undertakings, ranging from the study of the effect of tax on the social services to drug abuse and hospices. He was involved with many voluntary organisations, and served as chairman of East Anglia Children's Hospices (1998-2002) and Help the Hospices (2001-10).
Until earlier this month Newton was active in proposing amendments and voting against aspects of the welfare reform bill, on issues such as the cutting of legal aid to people pursuing welfare benefit appeals.
A modest but telling point about him is that his two daughters, Polly and Jessica, by his first wife, Janet Huxley, both went to state schools and that this Tory health minister did not belong to any private scheme. He had married Janet in 1962, and they divorced in 1986.
His second marriage was to Patricia Gilthorpe: she survives him, as do his daughters and stepchildren, Robin, Emma and Sukie.
• Antony Harold Newton, Lord Newton of Braintree, politician, born 29 August 1937; died 25 March 2012