Bryan Magee, who has died aged 89, was a distinguished broadcaster, academic, author and a gifted populariser of philosophy; he also spent nearly a decade in Parliament as a backbench Labour MP before defecting to the SDP.

Magee would have been the first to admit that his political career was the least of his achievements and sometimes regretted that he had gone into the Commons at all. Although he was a good speaker and played an active part in some high-profile debates, it was always clear that his heart was not in it, and he left politics without making his mark on the legislative process.

The intellectual was really the dominant element in Magee’s personality; he saw the details of public life as far less important than his own inner philosophical pilgrimage, and it was his books and broadcasts which represented the real Magee more than his political activities.

Magee was best known to the general public for his two series of television programmes – Men of Ideas (1978) and The Great Philosophers (1987) – in which he achieved the near-impossible feat of presenting to a mass audience recondite issues of philosophy without compromising intellectual integrity or losing ratings. This was a huge achievement. Men of Ideas attracted a steady one million viewers per show.