Politician and speech therapist;
Born February 4, 1934
Died May 6, 2008.

RAY Michie, who has died at the age of 74, was the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Argyll and Bute and later a member of the House of Lords. She was also - as Janet Bannerman - the daughter of John Bannerman, the much-respected Scottish Liberal stalwart and peer.

To say that Michie was close to her father would be an understatement. Raised with her sister and two brothers in a household imbued with traditional Gaelic culture, Ray (as she later became known) also inherited her father's political passion for the Highlands region and Scottish home rule.

Michie even shared a room with her father when he worked for the Air Ministry in Aberdeen near the end of the war. She was then at the city's High School for Girls and sometimes accompanied him to meetings of An Comunn Gàidhealach (which ran the Royal National Mod) with a conspiratorial air because it was past her bedtime.

Bannerman's office was in an attic just down the road and at lunchtime his daughter would wait outside the building, looking up at the window until he looked out and waved, the signal that he was ready to leave. In the evening, Michie would sit up in bed pretending she was writing a novel, in imitation of her father, who often laboured over a never-published manuscript.

All Bannerman's children were brought up to sing and to take part in the Mod, and indeed Michie's sister Elizabeth became an accomplished folk singer. Michie also accompanied her father during seemingly endless election and by-election campaigns fought in Argyll and Inverness-shire from the end of the war until 1964.

Although Bannerman was repeatedly thwarted in his attempts to become an MP, he was appointed to the House of Lords two years before his death in 1969. Almost 20 years later a Bannerman finally succeeded in capturing the Argyll constituency - rechristened Argyll and Bute in 1983 - although by then Janet Bannerman had become Ray Michie, and the Liberal Party had evolved into the Liberal Democrats.

Janet Ray Michie was born on February 4, 1934, one of two daughters and two sons of John Bannerman and his wife, Ray Mundell. He was then working as a farm manager on land owned by the Duke of Montrose. After leaving Aberdeen High School for Girls, Michie was educated at Landsdowne House in Edinburgh and the Edinburgh College of Speech Therapy, where she trained as a speech therapist.

Michie soon followed in her father's political footsteps. She was adopted as the Liberal candidate for anticipated elections to a new Scottish Assembly, but when a referendum in March 1979 killed hopes for devolution she instead stood in the same constituency at the resulting General Election in May. Michie contested the seat again in 1983, and eventually won it on a third attempt in June 1987. She was then working as area speech therapist for the Argyll and Clyde Health Board and defeated the incumbent Conservative MP and minister, John MacKay.

Michie proved to be a diligent MP. In 1991 she became chairperson of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, and served as her party's spokesman on Scottish Affairs, also sitting on the Select Committee on Scottish Affairs from 1992-97. Charles Kennedy, then a parliamentary colleague and a future party leader, said she had a "first-class political brain".

The work of John Bannerman also lived on through Michie's advocacy of devolution for Scotland (she was an early participant in the Scottish Constitutional Convention) and promotion of the Gaelic language. She remained an active member of An Comunn Gàidhealach, the National Farmers' Union of Scotland, and the Scottish Crofters Union, while maintaining her professional involvement as vice-president of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

In 1997 Michie was appointed by the Speaker to the chairman's panel, and later became a joint vice-chairman of the parliamentary group on the whisky industry. She stood down from the Commons at the 2001 General Election and joined the House of Lords as Baroness Michie of Gallanach, becoming the first peer to pledge the oath of allegiance in Gaelic.

In August 2007 Michie was appointed to the Scottish Broadcasting Commission established by the minority SNP Scottish Executive, a position she insisted on taking up despite an ongoing battle with cancer.

She died on Tuesday and is survived by two of her three daughters, Deirdre and Fiona. Her husband Ian, a consultant physician, died in 2006.