Politician and businessman; Born May 17, 1925 Died November 30, 2007.

Ian MacArthur, who has died aged 82, was the MP for Perth and East Perthshire who, decades before the advertising executives of the 1980s sought political careers as a natural extension of their profession, left the giant J Walter Thompson agency to become a Scottish Unionist MP.

Tall, blonde and vigorous, MacArthur was a natural performer in the Commons. His maiden speech was on the Scottish tourist industry, which he felt, appropriately for an advertising executive, suffered from a bad image. Despite being a bright, stylish and convivial MP, MacArthur never quite sold himself to party grandees and did not progress beyond the whips' office.

He was born the younger son of Lieutenant-General Sir William MacArthur, and was educated at Cheltenham College. He joined the Royal Navy and saw active service in destroyers in the Mediterranean, becoming partially deaf in his left ear as the result of gunfire during the Italian campaign. He finished the war as flag lieutenant to the C-in-C Portsmouth, a role which, he later joked, involved making himself invisible and saluting a lot, not to mention becoming friends with the future Duke of Edinburgh.

After the war, MacArthur studied modern languages at Queen's College, Oxford, and then worked as a consultant with J Walter Thompson in London, ultimately becoming its director of administration. At the time, it was one of the world's largest ad agencies and MacArthur was devoted to the firm, retaining links with it during his time in parliament and attending diligently an annual reunion until just last year.

MacArthur was also a fine musician and a lifelong Francophile. He sang and played the piano and, as a young man, earned extra income singing French songs in London nightclubs, even recording a couple of records. Politics, however, was his real passion. He was an active Young Unionist, later serving as honorary president of the Scottish Young Unionists from 1962-65, and was chosen to contest the Labour seat of Greenock at the 1955 General Election.

The incumbent MP was the popular former Scottish Secretary, Hector McNeil, but MacArthur still came close to winning. When McNeil died prematurely a few months later, MacArthur stood again in the resulting by-election.

He was rewarded for his perseverance with selection for the old constituency of Perth and East Perthshire in 1959. He secured it with a mighty 13,728 majority. An early parliamentary biography summed him up as a "London Scots advertiser; orthodox traditionalist". That orthodoxy won him an appointment as a junior government whip in 1962, from which he was promoted to become a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury - or senior whip - in December 1963.

An effective speaker, the previous month MacArthur had assisted Sir Alec Douglas-Home in the neighbouring constituency of Perth and West Perthshire as he sought to return to the Commons (having renounced his peerage) as Prime Minister. At one meeting, Sir Alec accidentally fell off a farm cart and MacArthur used his handkerchief to wipe a speck of blood from the premier, joking that he must preserve it as blue blood.

When Home narrowly lost the 1964 General Election, MacArthur remained in the whips' office, moving to the shadow Scottish front bench after Edward Heath became party leader in 1965. He was quietly effective on Scottish affairs and co-authored a CPC pamphlet entitled "The Grandest Thing in the World" on Scottish education policy.

MacArthur also piloted four private member's bills through the Commons, the most notable becoming the Domicile and Matrimonial Proceedings Act of 1973. This freed women who were separated but not divorced from being legally domiciled wherever their husbands were. Lord Denning approved, saying it abolished "the last barbarous relic of a wife's servitude".

In 1972, MacArthur became both vice-chairman of the Scottish Conservative Party and chairman of the Scottish Conservative Members' Committee and, although he held on to his seat at the February 1974 election, despite boundary changes, that October he lost by 793 votes to the SNP candidate Douglas Crawford.

A lifelong friend of Poland, MacArthur was awarded the Gold Cross of Merit by the Polish Government in exile in 1971.

From 1977 until his retirement in 1989 he was director of the British Textile Confederation, also being appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1984 and awarded an OBE in 1989.

He is survived by his wife, Judith, whom he married in 1957, and seven children.