Geoffrey de Freitas - Parliament and Abroad

Parliament and Abroad

He beat the sitting Conservative MP for Nottingham Central in the 1945 election, and was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to Clement Attlee. As Under-Secretary for Air he went to the United Nations Assembly at Lake Success in 1947. Some years later he would co-author a booklet on the subject of an Atlantic Assembly, and he had a long-standing connection with the North Atlantic Assembly.

In the 1950 general election de Freitas became Member of Parliament for Lincoln. He was appointed Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department and held a succession of front bench posts throughout the decade. For a while Betty Boothroyd was assistant to de Freitas and she remained a friend of the family. Geoffrey and Helen now had three sons and a daughter.

In 1961 de Freitas was nominated to be British High Commissioner to Ghana, and was knighted in October of that year. He resigned his seat in the Commons on 20 December 1961, taking the sinecure of Steward and bailif of the Manor of Northstead. He was the first Labour appointment to an important role in one of the newly-independent former British colonies. In 1957 he had chaired a Hansard Society conference on parliamentary government in West Africa. After Accra, he was briefly in Nairobi, as British representative supporting an attempt to build a Federation of East Africa which would include Uganda, Tanganyika and Kenya.

In 1964 he was invited to stand for election to represent Kettering, then a safe Labour seat, and returned to England. There was no front bench role for him with Harold Wilson as party leader, but de Freitas led the Labour delegation to the Council of Europe in 1965 and was President of the Council from 1966-1969.

In 1971 his reluctance to be nominated for election as Speaker of the House of Commons led to a reappraisal of the system. From 1975-1979 Sir Geoffrey was a delegate to the European Parliament.

He retired from politics in 1979 and died three years later, in Cambridge, aged 69.

The autobiography he was writing with his wife, The slighter side of a long public life, was published in 1985.