Smyth became Grand Master of the Orange Order in 1971, in what was seen at the time as a working-class "grass roots" revolt against the till middle-class leadership of the Order.. In the 1970s, he was a Deputy Leader of the Vanguard movement which had emerged as a faction within the Ulster Unionist Party. However, when this faction split from the UUP to form the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party, Smyth chose to remain with the UUP. His name was linked in the Belfast Telegraph with the UUP candidacy for the Belfast North constituency in 1974. However, he did not stand there, and the following year, he was elected to the Constitutional Convention for Belfast South, polling more than double the electoral quota.
Member of Parliament
He was selected to fill the vacancy caused by the murder of Robert Bradford. Smyth was consequently elected Member of Parliament in a 1982 by-election, receiving 17,123 votes. Later the same year, he was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly, again polling double the electoral quota. He along with all other Unionist MPs resigned his seat in 1985 in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement. He successfully defended his seat in the subsequent by election. In his paper "A Federated People", Smyth proposed a federal United Kingdom with the state governments of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each being autonomous from each other and, most significantly, fully independent from the federal parliament and government of the United Kingdom at Westminster. Smyth was on the parliamentary advisory board of Western Goals which held a well-attended fringe meeting at the Conservative Party conference in October 1988 on the subject of "International Terrorism – how the West can fight back". He was one of numerous high-profile speakers including General Sir Walter Walker, Andrew Hunter MP, Sir Alfred Sherman and Harvey Ward. Hunter and Ward both gave considerable detail to the meeting concerning top-level links between the IRA and ANC. Having won first place in the ballot for Private Members' Bills, Smyth successfully introduced the Disabled Persons Bill to afford disabled people in Northern Ireland analogous rights for disabled people elsewhere in the United Kingdom as provided for in the Disabled Persons Act 1986. Smyth's Bill received Royal Assent in 1989.
In January 2005, Smyth announced he would be stepping down from Parliament at the next election to spend more time with his wife. He ended his House of Commons career in May 2005. During the election Smyth courted controversy when he and former Ulster Unionist leader James Molyneaux appeared in a photograph with Democratic Unionist Party candidate Jimmy Spratt on Spratt's election literature. Smyth denied endorsing Spratt stating: The candidates Smyth did canvass for were David Burnside in South Antrim and Rodney McCune in North Antrim. In the event neither Unionist candidate won in South Belfast, with the seat being taken by the Social Democratic and Labour Party's Alasdair McDonnell amidst a split in the vote between the two Unionist parties.
