A famous Liberal Democrat peer Lord Mackie of Benshie has died aged 95, a decorated airman with Bomber Command in the second world war as well as a renowned farmer.
He was a chairman of the Caithness Glass company and a hotelier at John O, Groats.
After the war he took over a farm at Benshie in Angus and subsequently set up a cattle ranch at Braeroy near Spean Bridge.
George Mackie, from a renowned farming family in Aberdeenshire, was elected as MP for the old Scottish Liberal Party in Caithness and Sutherland in1964. But he served only until 1966 when Harold Wilson's Labour Government went back to the country to seek a larger majority. Mackie lost narrowly.
In 1974 he was offered a life peerage. His brother John, who had been on the Labour benches while he was in the House of Commons, also arrived in the House of Lords as a Labour peer.
But he was no fan of the upper chamber having people whose sole qualification was an accident of birth. In a debate in 1998 about reform of the House of Lords Lord Mackie insisted: ''Hereditary peers must go and they must go before anything else.''
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