Harold Creighton

Harold Creighton, who died on Thursday aged 75, was a self-made entrepreneur in the machine tool industry who became proprietor and editor of The Spectator.

Creighton's ownership of the weekly magazine from 1967 to 1975 was a period of falling circulation and internal strife. He sacked two editors and parted company with a number of well-known contributors before taking on the editorship himself in 1973; by the end of his tenure the very survival of the magazine was in doubt.

Nevertheless, he retained The Spectator's reputation both for intelligent Right-wing comment and for conviviality, and took a brave stance as the only national paper to call for a "no" vote in the 1975 referendum on Britain's continued membership of the Common Market.

Harry Creighton was alerted to the fact that The Spectator was for sale in April 1967 by a diary paragraph in the Evening Standard, and was persuaded (by, among others, Lord Boothby over dinner at Wilton's) to buy it as a launching pad for his political and social ambitions.

The magazine was then under the editorship of Nigel Lawson and the ownership of the Conservative MP Ian Gilmour; but Gilmour had tired of its losses of around £20,000 a year, and had asked the financier Jim Slater to find him a buyer. Creighton had done business with Slater before, and a deal was quickly put together at a price of £75,000.

Under arrangements dating from 1928, a new proprietor had to secure the approval of a committee of trustees (to include representatives of the Headmasters' Conference and the, by then extinct, London County Council) charged with ensuring that the magazine did not fall into the wrong hands.

Creighton duly went before the committee - whose chairman turned out to have shooting rights over Creighton's estate near Chichester. Several other potential bidders were in the wings (among them Woodrow Wyatt, George Weidenfeld and at least one wealthy American), but Slater pressed Creighton's suit and Gilmour was anxious for a swift conclusion.

Creighton and Lawson (who had tried to put together a bid of his own) did not warm to one another, the latter insisting firmly on editorial independence. Creighton did, however, prevail in a wish to see more financial coverage in the magazine - to attract more financial advertising - and earned the gratitude of his staff by reinstating a dining room in the basement of the magazine's rambling offices at 99 Gower Street: the designer David Hicks was called in to advise on the colour of the walls. But proprietor and editor could not agree on the colour scheme for the magazine's cover, Lawson favouring mauve while Creighton pressed in vain for green.

In 1970, after Lawson was adopted as a parliamentary candidate, Creighton dismissed him, offered the job to Bernard Levin, who turned it down, and finally appointed the political columnist George Gale to the chair. The circulation of the magazine had fallen from 36,000 in 1966 to around 25,000, and it galled Creighton that he was unable to make it run efficiently and profitably like his machine tool businesses: he once told an interviewer that at least "our stapling is a lot better" than that of the rival New Statesman.

He cut the editorial staff from five to four - while increasing the size of the advertising sales team, to little effect except for a rush of small ads for saunas and massage parlours. Finally, in September 1973 he sacked Gale (though they remained on friendly terms) and took over as editor himself.

The Spectator's managing director of that era, George Hutchinson, described Creighton as "not without aptitude, albeit of a somewhat slapdash, capricious sort". He could be choleric or charming by turns and was immensely hospitable, hosting lunches in Gower Street almost daily. He loved gossip, especially about celebrities and his business acquaintances - about whom he contributed his own column, "Skinflint's City Diary".

At a low ebb in Conservative fortunes, Creighton maintained the magazine's traditional allegiance, refusing to allow Patrick Cosgrave to write a pre-election leader in February 1974 urging readers to vote Labour. But after that election he dedicated The Spectator to the cause of evicting Edward Heath from the Tory leadership, becoming an ardent supporter of Margaret Thatcher.

He was even more single-minded in his opposition to British membership of the Common Market, providing office space in Gower Street for the cross-party Get Britain Out campaign group assembled for the June 1975 referendum - which produced a 2:1 majority for staying in.

But circulation continued to fall - to below the 17,000 figure claimed for 1974. Weekly losses and a run of libel suits had depleted Creighton's resources. The Gower Street building was crumbling.

By 1975 Creighton had let it be known that The Spectator was for sale again. It was fortunate both for him and for the magazine that another wealthy businessman with political aspirations - Henry Keswick, chairman of the Hong Kong trading house Jardine Matheson - was prepared to pay him £75,000 for it in August that year.

Creighton sold 99 Gower Street separately, and the magazine moved to its present home in Doughty Street to be revivified by a new editor, Alexander Chancellor. Some months later, Creighton acknowledged that Chancellor's Spectator was "very good indeed . . . although I don't go all the way with his liberalism".

Harold Digby Fitzgerald Creighton, the son of a clergyman, was born on September 11 1927 and was educated at Haileybury. After a National Service commission in the Royal Armoured Corps in India and Egypt, and a couple of years in the tin-smelting business in Penang, he returned to London and went into the machine tool business as sales director of a company called M C Layton, dealing in second-hand machinery.

In 1956 he branched out on his own as Tate Machine Tools, and for a time he also owned a printing works at Fulham. In 1963 he sold Tate for £250,000. He invested in another business in the same trade and two years later, with Jim Slater's guidance, he effected a reverse takeover to gain control of a Glasgow-based public company, Scottish Machine Tool Corp, of which he became chairman and principal shareholder.

Creighton was in fact Slater's first client for this sort of transaction, and Slater's firm, the investment group Slater Walker, proposed to charge only £1,000 for the service. Creighton told Slater that he obviously knew little about City fee scales, and should charge at least £5,000 - the figure on which they finally agreed.

Towards the end of his time at The Spectator, Creighton started to develop other publishing ideas in the field of "girlie" magazines. He bought Lilliput, a title which had not been published since 1961, intending to relaunch it with a mixture of short stories and nude pictures to fill a market gap "somewhere between Reveille and Reader's Digest"; the project never came to fruition. He also invested £10,000 in a new magazine, Cockade, which folded after one issue. In later years, he maintained a portfolio of industrial and other business interests, but was little heard of in the public arena.

Harry Creighton married, in 1964, Harriet Wallace; they had four daughters.