John Peel (Leicester MP)

He attended Wellington College and Queens' College, Cambridge. His first career was in the Colonial Service; he survived imprisonment by the Japanese during the Second World War, when he was stationed in Singapore, to later serve terms as British Resident in Brunei and then Resident Commissioner in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony (now Kiribati and Tuvalu) before retiring in 1952. His father Sir William Peel had been Governor of Hong Kong.

Peel was elected as a member of the House of Commons at a by-election in 1957. In July 1959, he provoked angry responses from the House when he reacted to the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya by stating: "There are obvious risks in dealing with desperate and sub-human individuals." In the resulting debate, Peel's remarks were denounced by Enoch Powell, who commented: "We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility".[1][2][3] Though Peel's tenure of minor government positions was uninterrupted, he never reached the Cabinet.

He was a zealous advocate of British involvement in Europe, through the Council of Europe, the Western European Union, and eventually membership—of which he was a leading advocate—in the European Communities. In 1972, he was chosen President of the North Atlantic Assembly. In the following year he was knighted, and also became one of the first British members of the European Parliament.

• Leigh Rayment's Historical List of MPs