As a student in Paris, he witnessed incidents of violence on Parisian streets during the Algerian War, including a gun battle on the Rue Souflot.

He established an onyx clock and metal component manufacturing company in a former felt mill in the Lancashire town of Ramsbottom.

A councillor on Ramsbottom Urban District Council from 1972–1974, he contested Darwen at both the February 1974 and October 1974 general elections and then Workington at a by-election in 1976.

Campbell-Savours was opposition spokesman for International Development (1991–1992) and for Food, Agriculture and Rural Affairs (1992–1994), resigning from the front bench in 1994 due to ill health: in 1995 half his lung was removed.

His repeated interventions in Parliament in the 1980s on land reclamation following closure of the Workington steel production plant led directly to the establishment of the West Cumberland Enterprise Zones, opening the door to later commercial developments.

Prior to his retirement from the Commons, Campbell-Savours negotiated a deal with the Labour government for the local authorities to secure ownership over 1000 acres of land, believed at the time to be contaminated, for the price of £1.

During a series of interventions during the debate on the war, he proposed the development of safe havens for Kurdish refugees seeking sanctuary from Saddam Hussain's military forces.

[14] In 2006 he used parliamentary privilege to reveal the identity of a serial false accuser, who had previously remained anonymous due to laws which protect women who report sexual assault.

[17] He has raised the lack of anonymity injustice in the cases of Former Prime Minister Edward Heath,[18][circular reference] the singer Cliff Richard, former Home Secretary Leon Britain, former MP Harvey Proctor, impresario Paul Gambaccini, Army Chief Ashley Bramhall, Greville Janner and others.

[19] Having voted for Common Market entry in 1974, Campbell-Savours (who'd spent much of his childhood living in Milan whilst a boarder at Keswick School), remained an advocate for the European Union until 2016, when he argued that Europe's direction of travel paid insufficient regard to the need for stronger border controls, expressing concerns over what he described as the "dark clouds of racial intolerance and extremism sweeping across the continent of Europe".

[23] He challenged both his party and the government's approach, arguing that it was an important part of Russian policy to maintain a string of non-nuclear, non NATO-affiliated barrier states, from the Arctic through Georgia and the Caucuses.