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Peter Griffiths, who has died aged 85, was a young Black Country headmaster who became a national political figure overnight when his capture of Smethwick for the Conservatives in 1964 led Harold Wilson to brand him a “parliamentary leper”. Griffiths had defeated Patrick Gordon Walker, whom Wilson nevertheless made Foreign Secretary, after a contest dominated by race.

While his views on immigration and integration were robust, the lanky, intense Griffiths always insisted he never used the slogan: “If you want a nigger for your neighbour, vote Labour”. But Labour pinned the phrase on him, relenting only when Enoch Powell presented himself as a better target.

It was a sign of Griffiths’s resilience that after being defeated in 1966 he regrouped in academia and later returned to the Commons. But he made little impact in 18 years representing Portsmouth North, never quite living down the extraordinary epithet with which Wilson had branded him.

Opening the debate on the Queen’s Speech on November 3 1964, Wilson, furious at the defeat of a key member of his incoming Cabinet, accused Griffiths of an “utterly squalid” campaign and castigated Sir Alec Douglas-Home for refusing to disown him. Then he provoked uproar by declaring: “If Sir Alec does not take what I am sure is the right course, and what the country will regard as the right course, Smethwick Conservatives can have the satisfaction of having sent a Member who, until another election returns him to oblivion, will serve his time here as a parliamentary leper.”

Peter Griffiths in 1964 (JOHN SILVERSIDE/ASSOCIATED NEWSPAPERS/REX)

Furious Tories urged the Speaker, Sir Harry Hylton-Foster, to make the Prime Minister withdraw. He refused, but added: “I always deplore language of that kind.” Twenty Tories walked out in protest, and it was 10 minutes before order was restored — the most chaotic scene in the House since Suez. While old Commons hands believed Wilson had blundered, his onslaught ensured that Griffiths’s Westminster career was dead in the water. Yet the new member’s response was courageous: “If Harold Wilson wants a fight, then he has come to the right man.”

Peter Harry Steve Griffiths was born in West Bromwich on May 24 1928. He trained as a teacher at City of Leeds College, did his National Service and then, while teaching in his home town, took a London University Economics degree and a Master’s in Education at Birmingham. In 1962 he became head of Hall Green Road primary school, West Bromwich.

Living in nearby Smethwick, Griffiths became active in the Young Conservatives and was elected to the local council at 27, causing a stir by demanding the removal of two “salacious” classical statues from a secondary school. He first fought Smethwick in 1959 - race not emerging as an issue as he reduced Gordon Walker’s 6,495 majority; next year, at 32, he became leader of the council’s Conservative group.

Griffiths’s initial line on race was liberal. When council tenants tried to block the letting of a maisonette to a Pakistani family, he upheld “the right of any person to be rehoused regardless of race, colour or creed”. He soon added the rider that anyone rehoused would have to have lived in the borough for several years. “This is not racialist,” he explained. “It’s being fair”.

With 7,000 immigrants - mostly Sikh foundry workers - out of a population of 68,000 and a worsening housing shortage, Smethwick was one of the first towns in Britain to come under strain through immigration. And as tensions rose, Griffiths shifted his ground.

He rejected integration in favour of “peaceful coexistence”, and called for immigrants unemployed for six months to be sent home. In the 1963 council elections, Gordon Walker said he heard children using the offending racist slogan.

Sensing that a tougher line could win him the seat, Griffiths, whose trademark was a two-tone Jaguar, went into overdrive, calling for a ban on immigration of unskilled workers. Confident, he took a flat in London months before the election was called.

With a tight outcome expected nationally and locally, Smethwick attracted a media circus. As the scholarly Gordon Walker endeavoured to make up for having neglected his constituency, Griffiths exploited his own ability to galvanise an audience. While his campaigning embarrassed some Conservatives, embattled Tory MPs across the West Midlands saw it as a lifeline.

On the day Griffiths ousted Gordon Walker by 1,774 votes. The “white backlash” also won the Conservatives Perry Barr and held several marginals, but a national swing to Labour installed Wilson with a majority of six. Griffiths — and the electors of Smethwick — came in for scathing criticism from Labour and Liberal politicians. But it was nothing to what Wilson had in store.

In his maiden speech Griffiths insisted there was “no resentment in Smethwick on the grounds of race or colour”, merely a serious housing shortage. Soon afterwards, though, he arranged for Smethwick council — he remained an alderman until 1966 — to buy up white-owned houses to prevent one street becoming a “ghetto”; the Housing Minister, Richard Crossman, refused to let it borrow the money.

Griffiths drew satisfaction from Labour’s embarrassment at the revelation that Smethwick Labour Club was operating a colour bar — and even more from Gordon Walker’s defeat at Leyton after a vacancy was created for him. But in the House, with Labour MPs publicly ostracising him and many Tories embarrassed, he found himself walking a tightrope on race.

He repudiated white extremists who saw him as a rallying-point yet urged the Home Secretary to exclude Malcolm X from Britain, advocating voluntary repatriation of immigrants and seeking to exclude pubs from race relations legislation.

Up for re-election, Griffiths felt obliged to repudiate racialism, but no prominent Tory apart from, reluctantly, Selwyn Lloyd spoke at his meetings. Labour chose a bruiser to oppose him: the bombastic Shakespearean actor Andrew Faulds. With Faulds giving no quarter, Griffiths lost by 3,490 votes.

Out of the House he wrote A Question of Colour?, in which he claimed to have “no colour prejudice”, but argued that only a “tiny” number of immigrants should be allowed, from the old Commonwealth, Europe and the United States. He blamed the spread of disease on immigrants from the Caribbean, and praised South Africa under apartheid as “a model of Parliamentary democracy”.

He got a temporary job in a West Bromwich primary school, but Labour councillors vetoed his appointment as a lecturer at Matlock College of Education. In 1967 he took up a lectureship in Economics at Portsmouth College of Technology. He took a year out as an exchange professor in California, then stayed at the college, by now a polytechnic, until his return to Parliament. Save for a brief boycott in 1977, his students never protested at his politics.

In 1972 Griffiths was selected for the new constituency of Portsmouth North. When the snap February 1974 election was called he was in hospital and saw Labour’s Frank Judd take the seat by 320 votes. He sat out that October’s election on health grounds, but in 1979 ousted Judd by 2,311.

Back in the Commons, Griffiths was overshadowed by the younger, Thatcherite new intake. Presciently if self-interestedly, given the closeness of Portsmouth naval dockyard, he opposed the cuts in the Royal Navy planned by John Nott before the Falklands conflict, voting against the 1981 Defence White Paper. He also put in sterling work on the Select Committee on Members’ Interests, himself refusing all outside work.

By 1987 he had quietly pushed his majority up to 18,401. But his assiduous raising of naval issues could not offset the passage of time and the coming of New Labour, and in 1997 he was unseated by 4,323 votes.

Peter Griffiths married Jeannette Rubery in 1962; they had a son and a daughter.

Peter Griffiths, born May 24 1928, died November 20 2013