His family owned Mather and Platt, an engineering company in Manchester, which was chaired by his father and later managed by his elder brother, William.

Mather was educated at Amesbury, Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, and then joined his elder brother at the family company as an apprentice for a short period.

In February 1940, before his officer training was complete, Mather volunteered to join the 5th Special Reserve Battalion, Scots Guards.

He was awarded the MC for a successful reconnaissance mission in Nijmegen on 18 September 1944, on the second day of Operation Market Garden, while it was still occupied by the German Army.

On 9 January 1945, he survived being on an Auster that was shot down near Grave in the Netherlands: the pilot was killed, and another passenger, Major Richard Harden, took the controls and crash-landed while Mather deployed the flaps.

He resigned his commission in 1962 to join the research department of the Conservative Party, working alongside Christopher Chataway and Anthony Meyer.

He stood for Parliament in Leicester North West at the 1966 general election; the Labour safe seat was held by the incumbent Barnett Janner by a wide margin.

He then joined 250 other aspiring MPs (including colleagues from the research department) in competing to be selected as prospective Parliamentary candidate for Esher, a safe Conservative seat, in 1969.

A memoir of his duties in Germany in 1945, visiting camps holding Axis prisoners, including Cossacks and Yugoslavs who fought for the Germans and who were returned to face an uncertain future under Stalin and Tito, the book was also a defence of Harold Macmillan against allegations of treachery made by Nikolai Tolstoy.

On 13 January 1951 Mather married the Honourable Philippa Selina Bewicke-Copley (born 5 December 1925), daughter of the 5th Baron Cromwell, who survived him after 55 years of marriage and died on 30 August 2021, aged 95.