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Campaigner: Leo Abse

Leo Abse, the former Labour MP who piloted a bill through Parliament that legalised homosexuality, has died at the age of 91.

Mr Abse passed away in Charing Cross Hospital, West London, last night after a short illness, a family friend said.

The Welshman was also credited with helping to liberalise divorce laws through the 1969 Divorce Reform Act.

Mr Abse is survived by his second wife Ania.

Wales Secretary Paul Murphy paid tribute to Mr Abse, saying he was 'deeply saddened' by the news.

'He was a personal friend for well over 40 years,' he added.

'He was a very distinguished parliamentarian and social reformer who has left an indelible mark on his country.

'The lives of millions of people over the years have been improved because of his social reforms.'

Abse, a Lilliputian Welsh fire-cracker, spent nearly 30 years as a Labour MP in a career seemingly designed to provoke minor but regular political explosions, to shock, and to draw attention to his own bizarre personality.

But he left his greatest surprise until he was 83, by marrying Ania Czeputkowska, a 33-year-old electrician and later a textile designer from Gdansk in Poland, in July 2000.

This was five years after the death of his wife Marjorie, after 40 years of marriage.

Before his second marriage, he spoke poignantly about widowerhood, saying: 'Although I was holding on, it was tough. It was an arid period. You behave stoically, but not happily."

His literary output included in 1996 a book about Tony Blair and "The Politics of Perversion", demonstrating that Abse, then 79, had no intention of mellowing with age.

This volume was plainly as startling as his earlier "psycho-biography" of Margaret Thatcher, in which he offered highly fanciful and occasionally erotic explanations for her obsession with litter, money, and her general personality.

In 2001, Abse created a political storm by suggesting that the late Lord Tonypandy (formerly Mr George Thomas), the ex-Speaker of the Commons, was a secret homosexual in the days when being gay was a criminal offence.

Flamboyant: Abse pictured outside the House of Commons on Budget Day 1969

Leo Abse, who was born on April 22 1917, was the reporter's friend - and foe - in the House of Commons.

He spoke at about 350 words a minute, fast-track, fluent and sparkling Welsh waffle that broke many a shorthand-writer's spirit. But he knew how to interest the press, through the issues he raised: homosexuality, divorce and capital punishment.

He was so successful that he got more backbench socially reforming legislation on the statute book than any other individual MP in the 20th Century.

Every Budget Day Abse's tailor transformed him into a strutting, gaudy peacock. His carefully timed appearance in the Chamber, resplendent in outrageous yet elegant attire, was calculated to upstage the Chancellor himself. It usually did.

His sartorial ideas were as unpredictable as his books. And the distinguished Dover Street tailors, Kilgour, French and Stanbury, were occasionally a little stand-offish, not to say nervous, about some of his proposals.

'But since I've been elected one of the Ten Best Dressed Men in Britain, they're getting into the spirit,' Abse once proclaimed.

One of his favourite outfits was a brown and black Prince of Wales check suit with cuffed sleeves, a lapelled waistcoat and no turn-ups, set off by a vast amber signet ring.

But psychoanalysis, which he encountered as a teenager in Cardiff when he was reading Marx, rather than the cut of the tuxedo, was Abse's principal fascination.

'Politicians hate psychoanalysis,' he once said. 'They are all extroverts who affect that there is no internal reality, that reality is only external.'

Abse, a solicitor, was MP for Pontypool from 1958 until 1983, and for Torfaen until he retired from Westminster in 1987.

James Callaghan once wrote to him: 'You do much more good in terms of human happiness than 90% of the work done in Parliament on political issues...'