Ron Brown, the former maverick Labour MP for Leith and one of the most controversial characters ever to grace the House of Commons, has died after a long battle with illness. He was 69.

Mr Brown had been suffering from liver failure. He died peacefully yesterday morning at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

A statement issued last night by his family said: "He will be greatly missed, not only by his family and friends, but by the many socialists and ordinary people whose lives he touched."

Former parliamentary colleague Dennis Canavan said last night: "I am very sorry to hear the sad news about Ron and my thoughts and prayers are with his family.

"Ron was a real character and even his enemies would have to admit that they will never see his likes again.

"He was often pilloried and ridiculed by the parliamentary establishment and certain sections of the media, but Ron and his late wife May were a formidable duo who stood up for the people of Leith and had the courage to take up causes which other politicians were afraid to touch."

Mr Brown was a working-class activist who never learned to handle the Westminster club. He suffered serious electrical burns at an Edinburgh engineering factory, and his trade unionism took him into the city chambers as a Labour councillor before he became the MP for Leith in 1979.

There, he was everything that the New Labour project was designed to eradicate - uniformly hard-left on all causes, a supporter of Moscow even after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - when he was to visit Kabul- and a friend of Libya who twice paid visits to Colonel Gaddafi.

But it was a very public affair with a secretary at Westminster, played out through lurid tabloid headlines, that proved his undoing, undermining his support back in Leith where local party sympathies were very much with his wife May, a stalwart party worker.

His deselection as Leith candidate was long and messy, and never really accepted by Mr Brown, who saw himself as a political martyr done down by his party's hierarchy and the right-wing media.

After he was succeeded by the constituency secretary, fellow left-winger Malcolm Chisholm, Mr Brown continued to believe that local people were still behind him. He became a taxi driver and took more than 4000 votes, over 10% of the poll when he stood as an independent Labour candidate.

He first courted controversy when he met Colonel Gaddafi during a number of visits to Libya in the 1970s and 1980s. He helped develop trade links between Scotland and Libya and secure the release, in 1988, from a Libyan jail of Scots engineer Robert Maxwell who served half of a 12-year sentence for alleged bribery and economic espionage. He also helped arrange leading Scots lawyers, such as George More, and the late Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, to visit Libya to arrange the Lockerbie bombing trial.

Mr Brown was also linked to the KGB who wanted to turn him into a mouthpiece for Kremlin propaganda. However, he later denied ever being a KGB agent saying: "My cat monitors all my calls now - it's very effective."

The colourful politician was suspended from the Commons in 1988 after brandishing the mace at then Tory cabinet minister Michael Heseltine during a debate on the poll tax. During subsequent poll tax protests he refused to pay and eventually appeared before a sheriff in court. He was deselected in 1990 by his Edinburgh Leith constituency after a series of incidents inside and outside the Commons.

He was rebuked in the Commons in 1992 for describing members of the royal family as "deadbeats". Later that year, he was sacked by the Labour Party following a series of scandals surrounding his personal and political life.

After losing his job as a Labour MP, Mr Brown remained active in politics as president of the Edinburgh Trade Unions Council. He went on to have close links with the Scottish Socialist Party and stood as a candidate in the Scottish Parliamentary Elections in 1999 on a platform of renationalising the privatised utilities and placing large tracts of land owned by "rich lairds" under common ownership.

Mr Brown is survived by his two sons, a loving partner, brother, six grandchildren, and a dog called Mac.