THE Vassall affair may have damaged the political career of Tam Galbraith, but he emerged with an official exoneration and an apology and damages from the publishers of the Daily Express.

His misfortune was to have been Civil Lord of the Admiralty between 1957 and 1959, for most of which time Vassall was his assistant private secretary.

One of his jobs was to deliver secret documents to the eighteenth-century country mansion in Mauchline, Ayrshire, of Mr Galbraith, the Conservative MP for Glasgow Hillhead since 1948.

When suspicions were finally raised that Vassall was living beyond his means, his flat was raided.

He was jailed, and Mr Galbraith, by then Joint Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Scottish Office, resigned from his post.

The subsequent tribunal into the Vassall affair described his appointment to Moscow as ``a decisive mistake'', but it said there was ``nothing improper'' in Mr Galbraith's relationship with him.

Beaverbrook Newspapers, meanwhile, had to pay a ``substantial'' sum in costs and damages after admitting that its coverage in the Express and its Scottish sister paper had been libellous of Mr Galbraith.

In 1963, he was politically rehabilitated by an appointment to the Transport Ministry in the Macmillan administration, a position he filled until the Tories lost power the following year.

Mr Galbraith held no further office, and illness limited his latter years in the Commons. He died in 1982, at the age of 64, only days after being awarded a knighthood in the New Year's Honours list.

He had been the heir to his father, Lord Strathclyde, a former Minister of State for Scotland, who died three years later.

Mr Galbraith's eldest son, who inherited the barony on his grandfather's death, is now the Government's Chief Whip in the Lords, after having served a two-year stint at the Scottish Office.