Paul Keetch obituary

It was much to the personal credit of Paul Keetch, who has died aged 56, that he won the marginal seat of Hereford, the garrison town of the SAS, at the 1997 general election and then held it for the Liberal Democrats through two subsequent elections despite his party’s opposition to the war in Iraq and the inevitable implications in a military community. His success was due to his ebullient personality and a heartfelt concern for every aspect of life in the place he had been born and raised.

His was a textbook career for an ambitious politician. He joined the Liberal party as a boy, chaired the local Young Liberals, was elected in 1983 to Hereford council, became the party’s local election agent and was chosen as parliamentary candidate in 1994. With a decisive victory three years later he became the first Liberal to represent the town since 1929, when it was won by the radical journalist Frank Owen.

Keetch became a close personal friend of Charles Kennedy, who appointed him as the party’s defence spokesman on becoming Liberal Democrat leader in 1999. This enabled Keetch to adopt a high local profile on foreign affairs and security issues that played well in the constituency, whatever the stance of the party’s policies. He exhibited what was seen as a “macho pride” in representing the home town of the SAS and was very concerned with military welfare issues.

He won friends as a lively, enthusiastic and very busy constituency MP, who belonged to every local organisation that asked him to join and campaigned tirelessly on their behalf. One of his first projects as an MP was to try to secure the availability of draught Hereford cider in the bars of the House of Commons. From Westminster he also developed an international role as a member of the Nato parliamentary assembly and later, from 2005, as a much-travelled member of the Commons’ foreign affairs committee.

His first job on the Liberal Democrat team was briefly as the party’s health spokesman in 1997, and he then spent two years as spokesman on employment and training before moving to defence. He attracted most attention on the national scene when the parliamentary expenses scandal broke and he was revealed to have claimed the maximum on claims for his second home in London between 2004 and 2008.

In 2009 he had claimed more than £142,000 in allowances during the previous year, including more than £87,000 on staffing salaries including those of his then wife. He had increased his mortgage from £145,000 to £300,000 by selling his property in south London and buying a more expensive one in an adjacent street and had claimed significant sums from the so-called “John Lewis list”, ranging from expensive items of furniture to a pudding basin and a cheese grater. Keetch defended his claims as “always in accordance with the rules”.

He also attracted criticism for breaching House of Commons rules on declaring outside interests. In 2005 he visited Gibraltar twice, as a guest of the Gibraltar government and the Liberal party of Gibraltar, and subsequently asked two parliamentary questions and tabled three early day motions without declaring his interests. The same occurred the following year when he visited Korea at the invitation of the Korean government.

He stood down as an MP at the 2010 election on medical advice. He suffered from a chronic heart condition and in 2007 had a cardiac arrest on a flight to the US, 90 minutes out of Heathrow. His life was saved by the pilot returning the aircraft to London and the fact that there was an Automated External Defibrillator on board. It was typical of Keetch that thereafter he vigorously crusaded for the widespread public installation of AEDs and every year met the airline stewardess from the plane on which he had suffered his attack in order to celebrate the anniversary of his second “birth”.

He was the youngest of five children born to John Keetch, an engineer, formerly in the RAF, and his wife, Peggy (nee Hughes). He went to Hereford high school for boys and Hereford sixth form college before joining the Midland Bank aged 17. After just a year he went to work in the water industry, where he remained until 1995. By this time he was a Liberal activist and became a public affairs consultant, among other things advising emergent democracies in Bosnia, Lithuania and Albania and also becoming director of an internet company. He resumed political advisory work on leaving parliament.

Last year he became the only prominent Liberal Democrat to advocate a vote to leave the European Union in the June referendum. He joined the Vote Leave campaign committee and chaired the Liberal Leave campaign, asserting that the EU was a body that had failed.

Keetch is survived by his son, William, from his 1991 marriage to Claire Baker, which ended in divorce.