Once described by the parliamentary correspondent Andrew Roth as a "1930s matinee idol type", Michael Grylls, who has just died at the early age of sixty-six, was an outspoken champion of small business and the free market. There was a touch of the buccaneer about him which led to more than one brush with authority and his final months in the Commons were clouded by the discovery that, as a result of a close relationship with the lobbyist Ian Greer, he had made financial gains that he had not disclosed in the register of interests. Sir Gordon Downey concluded that he had "seriously misled" the Select Committee on Members' Interests and that his conduct had fallen below the standards expected of Members. There is no doubt that he had understated the payments he had received for introducing clients to ministers, but his association with Greer was well known and if sleaze had not loomed so large as an issue, it is possible that his denial of deliberate intent might have been accepted. It was an unpleasant ending to a lively backbench career as a gadfly of Government whichever party was in power. That he was overly preoccupied with making money seems undeniable.
Although the son of a Brigadier, his ambition was to join the navy and after prep school at St Ronans, Hawkhurst, he went to Dartmouth. Denied a sea-going career by poor eyesight, he spent three years as a marine commando, before leaving in 1955 to study Spanish at the University of Madrid. He then set up the Costa Brava Wine Company to import Spanish champagne and wines. Not unnaturally the Champagne Association of Britain took umbrage and backed by a number of French champagne houses, sought his prosecution for falsely describing his Perelada sparkling wine as champagne. Grylls was acquitted by an Old Bailey jury in 1958, but although his trade boomed as a result of the case, the champagne houses resorted to the civil courts with greater success. Grylls was adjudged to have "passed off" the wine and paid up with good grace. Not a whit deterred, he was soon importing the real thing. There was to be a further brush with the law in 1971 when he was fined for breaching the Exchange Control legislation.
His political career began in 1959 with a three year term on the St Pancras Borough Council and he was the selected to fight Michael Stewart in Fulham in 1964. He was already showing robust right-wing tendencies and was criticised for making immigration an issue. He also secured considerable publicity by presenting every successful Conservative MP with a bottle of champagne.
Conservatives of his generation were for the most part doomed to fight the same seat twice in eighteen months and he again went down to defeat in March 1966. In the following year he was elected to the Greater London Council and took his place on the Inner London Education Authority, where he chaired the Higher and Further Education Committee 1968-70 and served for a year as deputy Leader 1969-70. By then he had been selected for the safe Tory seat of Chertsey, which he won in 1970 with an eight per cent swing. When boundary changes were implemented in the course of the parliament Grylls found himself in an even safer seat, Surrey North West, which he held until he stood down in 1997. From the start he campaigned vigorously for his constituents, somewhat surprisingly urging that the Government should give financial support to the BAC311, which was to be built by his constituents and he used his maiden speech to urge ministers to support that aircraft and not the European Airbus. More characteristically in March 1972 he called for uneconomic pits to be closed down faster, the start of a long war against the subsidisation of state enterprise and against state interference in industry. One particular target was the NEB, which he wished to see abolished - he co-authored a 1980 pamphlet National Enterprise Board: A case for Euthanasia - but he was also vehemently opposed to the subsidisation of BL. He criticised them for seeking to replace the Mini and urged that they switch out of car production into the manufacture of trucks and buses. He made a savage attack on the Labour Government's proposal to subsidise the export of ships to Poland as "supreme folly" in December 1977. Once the Conservatives were back in office in 1979, he urged that parts of the British Leyland should be sold off and he also urged the break up of British Steel. He was a strong supporter of privatisation and urged the speeding up of the programme in January 1984. He co-authored a CPC pamphlet, Reversing Clause Four making that point and subsequently argued that the coal mines should be sold to the miners and later in 1986 that the water industry should be privatised.
On these issues he was speaking with all the authority of an influential backbencher since he had been elected as Secretary of the Conservative backbench Industry Committee in 1974, Vice Chairman in 1975, and finally in 1981 long-serving Chairman of what was now the party's Trade and Industry Committee. He beat off a challenge from the "wets" in November 1984 and a further challenge from Charles Wardle and Tim Smith in July 1987.
Some of the campaigns he undertook were the result of his position as consultant for the pharmaceuticals industry and others were prompted by his association with Ian Greer, notably his warnings against a GEC takeover of Plessey and his campaign against unitary taxation, which led to a successful amendment to the 1985 Finance Bill. In 1989 he opened himself to serious criticism when he allowed Greer to attend a meeting of the Conservative Trade and Industry Committee. But he was never anyone's poodle. He was a staunch supporter of small business and in February 1979 secured a second reading for a bill to allow them to offer temporary two year contracts without facing the need to pay redundancy. In July 1979 he was appointed chairman of the Conservatives Small Business Bureau and introduced a bill to create a ministerial for small businesses to report direct to the Prime Minister. He pressed the case for a Business Start Up scheme, but when it was introduced in May 1981, he attacked it as too complicated. A further bill to deregulate small businesses was talked out in January 1985.
His views were almost always uncompromising and well to the right, but he was never a libertarian where smoking was concerned. He made an unsuccessful attempt to curb the abortion "vultures" in 1974, but after getting a second reading for his private member's, it was talked out. He was a strong advocate of curbing the trade unions and wanted employers to be able to sue if secondary industrial action took place. He backed Margaret Thatcher's opposition to sanctions against South Africa and deplored Barclays' withdrawal from that country in 1986. Always ready with a quote for the press, he could get himself into deep water as he did when praising the restraint of British troops in Northern Ireland in February 1972 or when accused of exacerbating the strike of House of Commons staff in 1975.
He was not afraid of unpopularity, backing the poll tax and remaining a supporter of Norman Lamont when other backbenchers were baying for his blood. Margaret Thatcher was an admirer and he in turn gave her loyal support. That support was given also to John Major and in the dog days of Conservative government he more than once rose from his sick bed to vote for it in a tight division. He had advocated British entry into the EEC in 1971 and remained a strong supporter of British membership of the EU, although by 1988 he had concluded that it could only prosper "if it is a Thatcherite Europe dedicated to free enterprise with the maximum deregulation of its markets."
After stepping down from the Commons in 1997, he continued to advise the young on how to start up small businesses, while his campaigning talents were turned to support of the preservation of country supports.
Described by his counsel in the Spanish Champagne case as a "bold young man" he became a suave, almost ultra smooth figure, but the outer appearance concealed a forceful and lively mind with a strong streak of irreverence and a talent for always seeing the funny side of life. In private life he was a good and loyal friend, a keen horseman and a lover of the sea. He was a shareholder in the Daring Yacht Division Belle and a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes. He had married in 1965 Sally Justice, secretary to successive party chairmen and daughter to Patsy Ford, herself a Unionist MP, who subsequently married the Conservative minister, Nigel Fisher. Sally and their two children survive him