Ted Leather's success was built, above all, on his skills as a forceful and witty public speaker. His smooth Canadian accent made his voice immediately recognisable, and he became a firm favourite with the Tory faithful for his forceful interventions at party conferences and his contributions to the radio programme Any Questions.

A founder-member of the "One Nation" Tory group, he denounced fraudulent practices in the City of London, demanded tighter rules governing "golden handshakes" and joined a white-collar trade union.

When the Royal College of Physicians produced a report on the health risks of smoking he dismissed it as "unscientific tosh", and described Lord Hailsham's support for it as "hysterical nonsense". Denying that he was influenced by the fact that many of his North Somerset constituents worked for Imperial Tobacco, Leather said: "I propose smoking until the day I die, just as my grandfather did until he was 95." However, he later gave up.

Leather began as an unflinching champion of Britain's imperial role, and was a scathing critic of the Americans, accusing them of undermining Britain during the Suez crisis. Yet, ever responsive to changing public opinion, he accepted that the Empire of Queen Victoria was dead and became a passionate opponent of racism.

Championing the granting of colonial independence, he reminded his fellow backbenchers that the Queen was Head of a Commonwealth in which half the citizens were not white. "Of course the pace of change in Africa is going dangerously fast," he declared later, "but thousands of dead French soldiers and civilians in Algeria testify to the folly of going too slow." In his latter years, Leather - a stong advocate of federalism - supported the European Union.

Edwin Hartley Cameron Leather was born in Hamilton, Ontario, on May 22 1919. He was educated at Trinity College School, where his lithe figure made him an excellent gymnast, and the Royal Military College at Kingston, Ontario.

After the declaration of war in 1939, he went overseas with the Artillery; but, after being hurt in a training exercise, he concentrated on organising gym, and baseball and football games, in southern England to occupy the bored troops waiting for action. This led to a weekly airshot on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and later the job of commentating on the two Canadian-American football matches held at White City before the Normandy invasion.

Deciding to remain in Britain after the war, Leather joined an insurance company and stood unsuccessfully in the 1945 election. He then made a name for himself as a "Hyde Park Tory" on a soapbox at Speaker's Corner, developing an ability to handle hecklers. After being elected MP for North Somerset in 1950, Leather became one of the most energetic backbenchers, harrying the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell and undertaking more than 200 speaking engagements a year around the country.

Since he was also a familiar figure on radio and television, it was no surprise that he was offered a knightood. But there was a complication: Canada had made no recommendations for titles since 1935, and the Tory prime minister, John Diefenbaker, declined to support Leather's appointment. However, after becoming a British citizen, Leather was knighted in 1962. He continued to enter Canada on his Canadian passport without hindrance, even after being appointed KCMG in 1974; the next year he became the first Canadian to be

appointed KCVO since the future 1st Lord Shaughnessy in 1907.

Always ready to rally to the cause, Leather announced just before Anthony Eden faced a no-confidence motion after the Suez fiasco, that he was changing the name of his house outside Bath to Eden Park.

But Leather was not afraid to raise his head above the parapet. In the Tory leadership contest that followed Harold Macmillan's resignation in 1963, he became a leading campaigner for Rab Butler.

However, after two serious illnesses, Leather announced that he was standing down in 1964, a decision partially forced on him by the low pay of MPs. For three years he was managing director of a leading west country engineering firm, John James Industrial; then, in the wake of the company's falling profits, he returned to politics.

In 1967 he was elected a vice-chairman of the National Union of the Conservative Party, and proved himself a particularly successful fund-raiser. As chairman of the 1970 party conference, he was noted for the positive gloss he put on speeches from the floor which were noticeably tepid even after Edward Heath's recent victory; he steered a safe course through the emotionally charged debates about Rhodesia and the Common Market by refusing dissidents a ballot.

Leather's extrovert ways ruffled feathers the moment he arrived in Bermuda as Governor in 1973. The chief of police asked him not to ride a biycle, so he had to be driven around in a limousine. But he thought nothing of pulling a rickshaw through the streets of the capital, Hamilton, for a charity-raising fund, or taking over from the orchestra's drummer at official parties. Local society was not always impressed, calling him "Hell for Leather" or "Imperial Leather", and his wife Sheila "Lady Vinyl".

He helped to avoid one diplomatic incident when he received a call to say that 60 Canadians, including two Cabinet ministers, had been turned back at the airport, near St George, because their papers were not in order.

Knowing that there was no point in contacting London for guidance, Leather telephoned Jules Leger, the Canadian Governor in Ottawa, and discovered that the problem stemmed from the fact that there were no formal relations between Canada and the colony. Eventually the matter was resolved, and Leather (the Canadian with three knighthoods and two ADCs) was formally invited to stay at Government House in Ottawa.

further unpopularity by deciding to remain on the island, and bought a home in the parish of Devonshire. "If one has been ordered to come to paradise, why leave it?" he said. He became a local director of NM Rothschild, and settled down to writing thrillers, such as The Vienna Elephant (1977) and The Mozart Score (1978).

Leather was an Anglican lay reader and a senior Freemason in both England and Canada. He was chairman of the Bath Festival Society from 1960 to 1965, a trustee of the Menuhin Foundation of Bermuda from 1975 to 1996, and from 1990 a governor of the Shaw Festival at Niagara, Ontario. He was a council member of the Imperial Society of Knights Bachelor, proving the indivisibility of loyalties to the Crown.