Lord Bethell

The former Conservative MEP Lord Bethell, the 4th Baron Bethell, has died aged 69 after suffering from Parkinson's disease. He was one of Britain's leading experts on eastern Europe, writing under the name of Nicholas Bethell, both as an objective analyst and controversial translator, especially of the dissident Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Curiously, Bethell's unauthorised translation and publication of Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward terminated his only post in the Lords, as a Conservative whip, in January 1971, after only seven months. Lord Jellicoe, the cabinet security chief, feared that he had possibly served inadvertently as a KGB instrument in publishing the book against its author's express prohibition. Understandably, Bethell moved to the European parliament, nominated in 1975, then elected for London North-West (1979-94) and the London region (1999-2003).

However, his renowned interest in eastern Europe, as displayed in such books as Betrayed (1984), his account of the Kim Philby affair, had come about somewhat accidentally. Born the son of a well-to-do stockbroker, he went from Harrow to Pembroke College, Cambridge. There he read oriental languages, in his case Arabic and Persian. But he also befriended Polish undergraduates, and this stimulated his interest in Polish and Russian.

From 1962 to 1964, he worked on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement, and till 1967 as a script editor for BBC radio drama. However, his marriage in 1964 to Cecilla Honeyman almost determined his destiny, since her father, a distinguished Arabist, was professor of oriental languages at St Andrews. The young pair were commissioned to produce a travel book on Morocco, and took up part-time residence in Tangier.

None the less, circumstances pushed him eastward. In 1967 he was commissioned to write the first biography of the Polish leader Wladyslaw Gomulka, and Gomulka: His Poland and His Communism appeared in 1969.

By then, Bethell's status had changed dramatically. In December 1967, his cousin, Guy Anthony, the 3rd Baron Bethell, died unexpectedly. This transformed Nicholas from a well-to-do freelancer into a hereditary peer with a seat in the Lords. Just after he made his maiden speech, he wrote to the Times to champion Polish students taking serious risks to resist their communist government - as opposed to British students "whose ideas consist of three and four-word slogans".

During the summer of 1968, he was preoccupied with the crisis in Czechoslovakia. In the Lords he blamed the Soviet invasion on Moscow's fear that "a germ of freedom had been born in Czechoslovakia and the possibility that this germ would spread throughout eastern Europe ... and possibly even to the Soviet Union". Typically even-handed, he also warned against continued irredentism - advocating the acquisition of territory considered to have been German - among West Germans ousted from eastern Europe.

A man of obvious intelligence and knowledge, he was awarded his first step on the Tory ladder when Edward Heath became prime minister in June 1970. But Jellicoe's warning to Heath brought that opportunity to an end.

Although Bethell was the most assiduous of MEPs for two decades, he failed to win reelection in 1994 because the Eurosceptic section of his Tory voters thought him too pro-European. Over his years in the European parliament, he was active as chairman of the human rights sub-committee: notable among his campaigns was his support for the Nobel prizewinning Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, released from internal exile in 1986. Bethell's Freedom of the Skies campaign in 1980 began the long haul towards the breaking up of big-carrier dominance and cheaper flights across Europe, and he was a consistent supporter of the right of Gibraltarians to remain British. He became convinced that Britain too needed its civil liberties pinned down in written form, as he affirmed in the Lords in November 1997.

While still in the Lords, he complained that it was "impossible to live off a peer's expenses. I would only get £8,000 [a year] if I attended every day the Lords are sitting", and acted as a paid consultant to the 120,000-strong Police Federation. His other books included the highly regarded The Palestine Triangle (1979).

He leaves his second wife, Bryony Morgan, their son, and two sons from his first marriage, which ended in divorce. The elder of these latter, James, inherits the title.

· Nicholas William Bethell, 4th Baron Bethell, politician, writer and translator, born July 19 1938; died September 8 2007

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