Earl of Mansfield: Peer who became a respected government minister and the keeper of his baronial home, Scone Palace in Scotland

Dogged by ill-health, Mansfield later devoted his energies to helping his wife Pamela develop Scone as a beacon of the British tourist industry

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Seldom in modern times can a Minister of the Crown have appeared more conscious of his family lineage and aristocratic position than William David Mungo James Murray, 8th Earl of Mansfield. This was not entirely surprising, since his home was Scone Palace outside Perth, where his talented wife, Pamela, was the chatelaine of one of the great stately treasures of Scotland open to the public.

In his Pevsner-like scholarly volume on Perth and Kinross, John Gifford writes: “Standing beside the coronation place of the kings of Scots and within parkland from which the medieval village of Old Scone had been cleared, [is] the huge but low-key castellated edifice built for David, 8th Viscount Stormont and 3rd Earl of Mansfield, in 1803-1812. The architect was William Atkinson, who displayed in this, his first major commission, his rather stolid interpretation of the picturesque Gothic manor of his master, James Wyatt. The site is within the grounds of the medieval Scone Abbey, whose buildings were destroyed by Protestant reformers in 1559, a prelude to the formal dissolution of the monastery.”

In some situations, Mansfield was provocatively aloof as a minister. On becoming Minister of State in the Scottish Office in Margaret Thatcher’s first administration, he disclosed that Glasgow was a place to which he had never been. Yet I give Mansfield huge credit: he was one of the first ministers I encountered in either house of parliament who took a serious interest in prisoners’ welfare; from 1974-1979 he was chairman of the Scottish Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders. He told me that he had been greatly moved as a teenager during one of his school holidays from Eton by a visit arranged by his father to Perth Prison, then one of the three biggest prisons north of the border. “You can imagine the contrast between living at Scone Palace, with peacocks on the lawns, and life behind bars in jail.”

Years later, when he entered the Lords, he reckoned that few peers and even fewer Members of the Crown would interest themselves in prison conditions, and that this was an important cause. His father, the 7th Earl of Mansfield, was a considerable figure in Scotland. He had been MP for Perth between 1931-1935; in 1934 he founded the Imperial Policy Group and was Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1961-1962. His mother was the daughter of Sir Lancelot Carnegie, a distinguished ambassador who had been minister in the British Embassy in Paris from 1911-1914.

At Eton, William Stormont, as he then was, went to the house of Reggie Colquhoun, a Scot partial to selecting Scottish boys for his house. I knew Stormont through the Eton College Caledonian Society, where he did an outstanding eightsome reel and sword dance. From school he went to the Scots Guards and was baptised under fire in that terrible Malayan campaign, when British soldiers never knew who was an enemy and who was a friend.

He told me that he had been greatly saddened by the killing of his school contemporary Paul Graham Watson, also a lieutenant in the Scots Guards. “I always realised that it could easily have been me.” Stormont was one of few Conservatives who was not gung ho about military operations. From the jungles of Malaya he went to Christ Church, Oxford to read modern history, which bought him under the aegis of Hugh Trevor Roper, who regarded his pupil as a man of considerable character, if not great academic scholarship.

When his father died, Stormont was selected to join the first, all-Conservative delegation to the European Parliament. The late James Scott Hopkins told me that he had been a useful member because of his knowledge of agriculture, which had impressed even the Dutch Commissioner, Sicco Mansholt. From 1975-1979 he was an opposition spokesman in the Lords, which earned him the position of Minister of State at the Scottish Office (1979-83).

This was rather a unique position. Because of Commons arithmetic Scottish ministers in the Commons were tied in London from Mondays to Thursdays, which meant that the many important ministerial duties in Scotland were better carried out by a Minister of State. Stormont had good relations with his boss, the affable George Younger, Secretary of State.

One of his interests was the arts in Scotland. In 1982, during the debate on national museums and galleries, he stated: “I fully share the committee’s concern that we should aim to preserve for future generations adequate examples of industrial plant and developing technology. Scotland was outstanding in the van of such developments in the past and we must not allow this to be forgotten.”

My own contact with Stormont at this time was about fishing, a subject dear to his heart. He and militant anglers reached a modus vivendi over the vexed subject of “blanket protection” because it was clear that both were serious about conservation of species.

Mansfield became a minister in the Northern Ireland Office, where he got on surprisingly well because he understood the agricultural problems which were so important to Ulster. He was able to give £63m to a range of agricultural services, education, research and development, drainage, fisheries, forestry and support for the agricultural industry, proportionately far more generous than in England.

Dogged by ill-health but displaying no signs of self-pity, Mansfield later devoted his energies to helping his wife Pamela develop Scone as a beacon of the British tourist industry. He was a most welcome senior member of the Historic Houses Association, having been chairman of the Scottish branch between 1976 and 1979.

William David Mungo James Murray, Baron Scone, Viscount Stormont, Baron Balvaird, landowner, lawyer and politician: born 7 July 1930; married 1955 Pamela Foster (one daughter, two sons); died 21 October 2015.