Radio show panelist & MP Clement Freud, 1924-2009

Sir Clement Freud, who has died aged 84, was famous for far more than his distinguished family connections (he was the grandson of Sigmund and brother of Lucian). At various points, he was chef, food critic, amateur jockey, Liberal MP and long-serving panellist on the popular BBC Radio 4 show Just a Minute.

But it is for his personality that he will be most remembered, said the Times: the blend, above all, of his "lugubrious, whiskered visage" and deadpan, frequently lethal wit. Freud always referred to his wife, Jill, as "my first wife", because, he said, it kept her on her toes.

A fierce opponent of smoking in public places, he was once told by a woman who had just lit up in a nonsmoking train carriage, "I'm only ten feet from the smoking section" - to which Freud shot back, "I am only five feet from the lavatory. Do you mind if I piss on the floor?"

Clement Raphael Freud was born in Berlin, in 1924, the third son of the renowned architect, Ernst Freud. His mother, he later recalled, used to enter the nursery and nod cursorily at him and his brother Stephen (who went on to run an ironmonger's) before sitting down and cosying up with little Lucian. "I did not realise for many years that this is not what good mothers do," Clement observed.

Between Lucian and him, there was little love lost, said the Daily Telegraph. On one occasion, when they were having a race in a park in Vienna, Lucian shouted out, "Stop, thief!", Clement was apprehended by a passer-by, and Lucian won. It is said that Clement never forgave him for it. (For his part, Lucian claimed the reason he had refused a knighthood was that his brother had accepted one.)

In 1938, to escape persecution by the Nazis, the family moved to London, where Clement served as an apprentice chef at the Dorchester Hotel. He always resented the fact that lack of funds prevented him from going to Oxford to study English, but his impressive intelligence secured him work as a journalist, and he wrote about everything from cookery to sport and politics.

In his early days in the Commons, his speeches were greeted by MPs barking

Yet he only really became a household name in the Sixties, after agreeing to do a series of TV advertisements for Minced Morsels dog food. The success of the ads was partly due to the striking resemblance between Freud and his co-star, a droopy-faced basset hound named Henry.

The following year he began his association with Just a Minute, the game show in which contestants try to talk for 60 seconds on a given topic "without hesitation, repetition, or deviation". Freud's naturally slow way of speaking stood him in excellent stead, as did his fierce competitiveness, said David McKittrick in the Independent.

Appearing alongside the likes of Kenneth Williams in the early days, and, later, Paul Merton, he was a much-loved panellist on the programme for 40 years. It was the kind of arena in which he felt most at ease, yet in 1973, to the surprise of many, he stood as Liberal candidate for the Isle of Ely.

They were even more taken aback when he won (picking up a tidy sum in the process, having put £1,000 on himself at 33-1). His career in Westminster was respectable without being remarkable - largely, Freud maintained, because the other MPs refused to take him seriously.

In the early days, his speeches were greeted with barking, which irritated him enormously. "People said: 'We'll show him'," he muttered in an interview, "just because he is well-known in some other form of life, we'll show him how unimportant he is to the overall run of things in public."

There was always a dark side to Freud's wit, said McKittrick, the humour edged by his capacity for rudeness and grudge-bearing. "There are people I hate," he once remarked in a characteristic sally. "I cannot remember why, but I will never forgive them." ·