Amar Singh, who chaperoned dowdy politicians to ideology-agnostic platforms where they rubbed shoulders with showbiz as well as corporate celebrities and who completed the “Amar-Akbar-Anthony” troika in politics, died on Saturday in Singapore. He was 64.

A Rajya Sabha MP at the time of his death, Amar was undergoing treatment for kidney-related ailments. Having started his public life, so to speak, in Calcutta with the student wing of the Congress, Amar made his presence felt after striking up a friendship with Mulayam Singh Yadav, the veteran politician from Uttar Pradesh.

A late entrant into “national” politics, Amar wormed his way swiftly into the charmed circles of the power elite, often using his networking skills to dazzle his relatively staid bosses with what he could bring to the table.

His political mentor and Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam was a prime example of the Amar Singh effect. It was Amar who transformed Mulayam from a classical heartland socialist, a cycle-riding one at that, to an unabashed suitor of Bollywood flamboyance and corporate riches.

It was Amar who brought into the Samajwadi “Netaji’s” intimate circles such people as Amitabh and Jaya Bachchan, Jaya Prada and the controversial boss of the Sahara empire, Subrata Roy. Anil Ambani was also part of the club.

Amar, Mulayam and Amitabh were then known as “Amar, Akbar, Anthony” — a nod to the Manmohan Desai blockbuster in which Amitabh played Anthony, and to Mulayam’s efforts to play protector to the minority community.

But many Samajwadi old-timers blamed Amar for “ruining” the ways of their leader and “diluting” the party’s “socialist essence”.

Amar was, equally, a deft political deal maker with connections across the political spectrum — a glib pleaser when he wanted to be and an acerbic adversary when he got on your wrong side.

He started on a sour note with Congress president Sonia Gandhi, gate-crashing a dinner she had hosted to cobble together a ruling coalition in 2004. Singh was ignored all evening and he famously fumed at Sonia.

But it was he who, four years later, stitched the deal that saw the Manmohan Singh government through the tense trust vote that followed the Left’s departure from the UPA over the Indo-US nuclear deal.

Typically, a year later, Amar was to pronounce his efforts to farm support for the UPA government a “blunder”. But while the Samajwadi Party supported the Manmohan government, Amar remained one of the most influential power brokers of the Delhi durbar.

Break-ups and patch-ups were part of the Amar Singh credo. He quarrelled often with Mulayam and was twice expelled from the party. He called Amitabh his elder brother but broke up bitterly with him only to regret that and sue for “brotherhood” again.