John Peel

Who was John Peel?

William John Peel, known after he was knighted in 1973 as Sir John Peel, was a British Conservative Party politician, and Member of Parliament for Leicester South East from 1957 to 1974.

He attended Wellington College and Queens' College, Cambridge. His previous career had been in the colonial service, surviving imprisonment by the Japanese during World War II, when he was stationed in Singapore, to 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 1951. His father Sir William Peel had been Governor of Hong Kong.

Elected as a member of the House of Commons at a by-election in 1957, he provoked an angry response from both sides of the House in 1959 when he reacted to the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya by saying "There are obvious risks in dealing with desperate and sub-human individuals." In the resulting debate, where Peel's remarks were denounced by Enoch Powell, it was emphasized that Britain needed to accord the same standards of human rights to all continents. Though Peel's tenure of minor government positions was uninterrupted, he never reached the Cabinet.