PETER Walker, who has died at the age of 78 after a long struggle with cancer, was by some distance the best known MP the Worcester constituency has ever had.

Appointed a Life Peer, as Baron Walker of Worcester on his retirement from Parliament in 1992, he was one of the longest serving members of the British Cabinet in the 20th century. Only Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Lord Hailsham beat him.

“That’s not a bad record to look back on is it?” he said at the time and it certainly wasn’t, considering in the latter years of his political career, as a so-called Tory “wet” he wasn’t always reading from the same hymn sheet as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Indeed, there was a feeling in Westminster the Iron Lady brought the Worcester MP back into the Cabinet to keep an eye on him.

As a great friend of previous Conservative leader Edward Heath, he could have posed a problem on the back benches.

Ironically it had been Peter Walker who persuaded Heath to include Mrs Thatcher in his 1970 Cabinet. “Ted’s never thanked me for that,” he once quipped.

A consummate political operator, Lord Walker served as either a Tory Minister, Secretary of State or Front Bench spokesman for almost a quarter of a century and was seen by many as a potential Prime Minister, the natural heir to Edward Heath. However, when the miners brought down the Heath Government in 1974, his realistic chances of the highest office went with it.

Born at Harrow in 1932, Peter Walker was a shopkeeper’s son and grammar school boy who, by only his mid-20s, had shot up to be a millionaire businessman - making his money in insurance and unit trusts - and a rising star of the Conservative Party.

He won the Worcester Constituency at a by-election in 1961 and retained his seat as the city’s MP at eight General Elections over the next 30 years.

From the moment he entered the Commons as its youngest member at 29, Peter Walker was seen as a highflyer and, within three years, he was on the Tory Front Bench as spokesman on finance and economics.

In 1970, he was made Minister of Housing and Local Government and promoted just six months later to Secretary of State.

The early 1970s were to be Peter Walker’s golden years, first as Secretary of State for the Environment and then as Trade and Industry Secretary.

Britain was the first nation to set up an Environment Department, and Peter Walker spearheaded the nation’s first positive approach to environmental policies.

Later at Trade and Industry, he encouraged investment in North Sea oil exploration and began forging effective trading links with Iron Curtain countries and China.

Less of a success, however, was the 1974 re-organisation of local government which he oversaw. It brought the uneasy “marriage” of Herefordshire and Worcestershire, and he even suggested the new merged counties should be called “Malvernshire.”

The “marriage” ended in divorce in the mid-1990s when much of the 1974 reorganisation was reversed or substantially altered.

Peter Walker’s first big fall from grace came in 1974, with the downfall of the Heath Government after which he had to be content with a place on the Opposition Front Bench.

However, worse still was to come in 1975, when Margaret Thatcher took over the party leadership and relegated Ted Heath’s campaign manager and “first lieutenant” to the Back Benches.

Even so, Mrs Thatcher was too astute to continue to ignore the undoubted managerial skills of Mr Walker nor the danger he posed to her outside the Cabinet.

He was appointed Minister of Agriculture in 1979, making such a much publicised success of it that he was promoted to Secretary of State for Energy in 1983 and, then four years later, moved to the post of Welsh Secretary.

During those latter years in the Cabinet he became one a tiny handful of so-called “Wets” in the Thatcher Government and was not averse to making veiled attacks on some Thatcher policies at Tory Reform Group meetings during party conferences.

As a young man Peter Walker had spent months in America with the campaign teams of John and Robert Kennedy and from then on always aspired to a liberal, middle-of-the-road form of Toryism, often quoting Disraeli’s “One Nation” philosophy.

In 2003 he was made an Honorary Freeman of the City of Worcester, its 31st, joining names like Lord Nelson, Sir Edward Elgar, Stanley Baldwin and Sir Winston Churchill.

One of his great interests was the hospice movement and it was somehow fitting Lord Walker’s last days were spent at St Richard’s in Worcester, a community he had supported so passionately in life.