[4] When the Scottish Board of Supervision, which administered the laws on the poor and public health, was reconstituted in 1868, Skelton was appointed secretary by Benjamin Disraeli.

in the 1897 Diamond Jubilee Honours although, as he died shortly thereafter, he was never invested with the insignia of the Order, and a Royal Warrant was subsequently issued granting his widow the appropriate style, title and precedence.

He is buried on the obscured lower southern terrace of Dean Cemetery in western Edinburgh with his wife, Dame Anne Adair Lawrie (1847-1925), and son Archibald Noel Skelton (1880-1935) and daughter Evelyn Margaret Skelton (1876-1952).

Joseph Noel Paton was one of his friends, as was Thomas Spencer Baynes from student days.

He used the pseudonym of "Shirley" from the novel by Charlotte Brontë, and became a regular contributor of essays and reviews to the Guardian, a short-lived Edinburgh periodical, and to Fraser's Magazine; he was on good terms with James Anthony Froude, its editor.

In 1862 appeared Nugæ Criticæ, a collection of his published essays, and Thalatta, or the Great Commoner, a political novel based on a character with characteristics of George Canning and Disraeli.

In 1876 he published another official work of authority, The Boarding-out of Pauper Children in Scotland (Edinburgh).