She served as the Member of Parliament for Argyll and Bute for fourteen years, from 1987-2001, and then became a life peer in the House of Lords.
[1] Her father was a farm manager to the Duke of Montrose, a former Scotland rugby player and Liberal politician.
She married Iain Michie in 1957, and she followed his work with the Royal Army Medical Corps for 16 years in the UK and overseas.
She increased her majority at the next two general elections, gaining the confidence of the voters in her scattered constituency of peninsulas and islands.
[citation needed] She was a Liberal Democrat spokesman on Transport and Rural Development from 1987–88, on Women's Issues from 1988–94, and on Scotland from 1988-97.
She supported the campaigns to end submarine operations of the Royal Navy and United States Navy in the Firth of Clyde,[citation needed] to hold another inquiry into the Chinook crash on the Mull of Kintyre in 1994 in her constituency,[2] and the successful bid for the residents of Gigha to buy their own island.