He was adopted in 1953 and won what was by then the slightly altered constituency of Howden in

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He was adopted in 1953, and won what was by then the slightly altered constituency of Howden in 1955 and held it until 1983. He was then persuaded by friends that he had still much to offer by way of disinterested advice to younger colleagues. He won the newly drawn Boothferry constituency in 1983 and served until the 1987 election.Shortly after he entered Parliament, Bryan was invited by Heath to join the Whips' Office. During the Suez crisis he expressed strong revulsion for Nasser's action, a feeling so universal in what was then very much a group of wartime officers that Heath never dared confess that he had doubts about the whole operation.

At some point during the Second World War he also came into contact with Edward Heath.The war over, Bryan joined his wife's family firm, J.B. Hoyle in Hebden Bridge, and in 1947 he was persuaded to become a member of the Sowerby Urban District Council At this point chance took a hand. The MP for Sowerby died and the Conservative Party asked Bryan to stand, his principal qualification being a good war - at Cambridge, he had been a member of the Hawks Club and later confessed that he never knew where the Union was.He fought the by-election and the two subsequent parliamentary elections, reducing the Labour majority to 1,600, and thought that was it. He was fortunate to escape capture in France, and with most of his battalion less lucky, he was able to take on a company, and by 1943 he was the youngest colonel in the British army, commanding the battalion he had joined in 1939.Although he modestly claimed that the key to his "really unique war record was that I was dogged by good luck", he took part in the landings at Algiers and fought through the closing stages of the North African campaign, the invasion of Sicily and the Italian campaign, winning the DSO and bar and the MC, as well as a mention in despatches. Many lasting friends were made along the way, including Fred Majdalany, the military historian and film critic, and Denis Forman, the television executive, who was to bring him to Granada.After Monte Cassino, by no wish of his own, he was posted in July 1944 to the Officer Cadet Training Unit at Barmouth in North Wales to bring his battlefield experience to bear on the training of new officers. He also fell in love with Betty Hoyle, whom he met in Halifax, and they were married in the summer of 1939. By then, bored with the lack of challenge in his job, he had joined Louis London and Sons, a clothing manufacturer in the East End of London.With war imminent, he enlisted as a private and since he was living just outside Sevenoaks joined the 6th Royal West Kents.

Iain Macleod and he played rugby for the college, precursor of their close working relationship at Conservative Central Office, and as Bryan later recalled they seemed to be on the same wavelength throughout their political career.After he had graduated a cousin offered him a job with Baldwin and Walker, a knitting-wool factory in Halifax, and he fell in love with Yorkshire. His rise through the ranks was dramatic - corporal in September, sergeant in October and a direct commission from the ranks in November. He served as Chairman of the All-Party Hong Kong Parliamentary Group from 1974 to 1987 and travelled at least twice a year to the Far East. He became a close friend of the Chinese shipping magnate C.H. Tung, who asked him to be deputy chairman when he bought the British shipping firm Furness Withy in 1983. Bryan was subsequently to introduce Chris Patten to Tung, a move with beneficial consequences as Tung emerged as the first Chinese leader of Hong Kong.Paul Elmore Oliver Bryan was born in Japan in 1913, the son of an Anglican priest (himself the son of Irish immigrants to Canada) who was also a poet and Professor of English at Tokyo University. The family returned to England when he was seven, and Bryan was educated at Dulwich Preparatory School, from where he took a scholarship to St John's, Leatherhead, and went up to read Modern Languages at Caius College, Cambridge.