He attended preparatory school in Grahamstown, South Africa, until the age of 12, when his mother, Helen Jean Meiklejohn, died.

In the House of Commons, he was a member of the Blue Chips dining club, which represented the left wing of the Conservative Party.

[2] During his time as Scotland's senior law officer, he was directly responsible for the conduct of the investigation into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

But five years after the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing trial, when Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of 270 counts of murder, he cast doubt upon the reliability of the main prosecution witness, Tony Gauci.

According to The Sunday Times of 23 October 2005, Lord Fraser criticised the Maltese shopkeeper, who sold Megrahi the clothing that was used to pack the bomb suitcase, for inter alia being "not quite the full shilling" and "an apple short of a picnic".

Boyd asked Lord Fraser to clarify his apparent attack on Gauci by issuing a public statement of explanation.

William Taylor QC, who defended Megrahi at the trial and the appeal, said Lord Fraser should never have presented Gauci as a crown witness: "A man who has a public office, who is prosecuting in the criminal courts in Scotland, has got a duty to put forward evidence based upon people he considers to be reliable.

[8] Baron Fraser was elected President of the charity Attend[9] (then National Association of Hospital and Community Friends) and held the position from 1989 until his passing in 2013.

[2] Owing to his reputation of being on the left of the Conservative Party, he retained a high profile in Scottish public life after 1998, in part through his involvement in commissions and inquiries.

[2] In May 2003 he was entrusted by the First Minister Jack McConnell with heading a major public inquiry into the handling of the Scottish Parliament Building project, which had racked up a total cost of £414 million since 1999.

[10] In 2013, he launched a public fundraising campaign for erecting a monument to the Polish general Stanisław Maczek in Edinburgh, which was eventually unveiled in 2018.