He was not the traditional diplomat accredited to the Court of St James’s. For one thing, he had an unmistakable Mancunian accent. For another, he had a British passport. Yet for five years Yehuda Avner served as Israel’s ambassador to the UK.

The day he handed his credentials to the Queen, she told him it was the first time she had ever received a British-born foreign ambassador. For him, it was the first time he had to give up his passport; protocol decreed that he could not be both a British subject and an envoy of a foreign country.

He turned a tour about which some had initially expressed doubts into one of the most successful representations Israel had had in London. Having developed a solid rapport with Margaret Thatcher and her government, he encouraged her to pay an official visit to Israel in 1986 — the first ever made by a serving British prime minister. “She was a good friend of Israel,” Avner recalled. “She asked me what she could do for the country. I informed her that a British prime minister had never before visited Israel. She immediately agreed to go.”

In addition to his diplomatic career, he was a speechwriter and senior political aide who served five prime ministers, from Levi Eshkol to Shimon Peres.

Avner was born into a working-class Orthodox Jewish family in Manchester in 1928. For the first 19 years of his life he was named Gubbi Haffner but he Hebraicised it to Yehuda Avner when he moved to Jerusalem in 1947. While attending Manchester High School and the London School of Journalism he had been active in the Jewish youth movement. When he emigrated to what was then Palestine he was one of the handful who managed to obtain visas to the British mandate.

Read the obituary in full in the Times.