The former Labour minister Frank Judd, who has died aged 86 of cancer, spent a lifetime in politics devoted to the passionate pursuit of human rights and social justice wherever in the world such things were in short supply or in need of defence. His cheerful enthusiasm for the many internationalist causes he espoused inspired widespread admiration because he was wholly without personal vanity and there was never even a hint of sanctimony to his politics. He spent 13 years as an MP, for the marginal seats of Portsmouth West from 1966 to 1974 and then, until 1979, for the redrawn new constituency of Portsmouth North. As a young MP he was offered the influential post of parliamentary private secretary to the leader of the opposition, Harold Wilson, as a result of a speech about the party’s election defeat in 1970 which impressed the then outgoing prime minister. From 1972, Judd served on his party’s front bench for the remainder of his career in the Commons. He was first a defence spokesman and then, on Wilson’s return to office in 1974, navy minister until 1976.
Wilson’s unexpected resignation as prime minister that year came at an opportune point for Judd. He had been discussing with Wilson his own intention to resign as a minister because of his disapproval of the government’s defence policy towards Chile in the wake of the 1973 military coup there. Circumstance spared him the need to do so. The new PM, James Callaghan, instead moved Judd to Overseas Development for a year, promoted him to minister of state, and he then spent two years in the Foreign Office before the Thatcher landslide cost him his seat. Although offered an immediate peerage in 1979, Judd chose instead to become director of the development charity Voluntary Service Overseas. He had worked in this field from 1960 to 1966 with International Voluntary Service. After five years with VSO, he moved to become director of Oxfam and spent a further six years there before accepting an offer from Neil Kinnock to join the House of Lords in 1991. He was on the opposition front bench as a spokesman on foreign affairs (1991-92), education (1992-94), overseas development (1994-97) and defence (1995–97), but after Tony Blair took Labour back into government he was not appointed a minister and became primarily occupied with committee work. He was a member of the joint committees for both the Commons and Lords on ecclesiastical affairs (from 2001) and human rights (2003-07), and of the Lords’ procedure committee (2001-04). In 1997 he embarked on eight years as a member of the assembly of the Council of Europe, on which he had previously been a member of the British delegation from 1970 to 1973. He served as its rapporteur on the Chechnya conflict (1999-2004), visiting Grozny on a number of occasions. He also continued to work with a number of influential international organisations as he did throughout his life. Judd was privately contemptuous of “New” Labour and would say subsequently that he became progressively more leftwing as he got older. He was by instinct a reformist, chairing the Fabian Society (1973-74), and he was never sectarian at Westminster, having friendships across the parties. He was not clubbable, was always happier working – or, as an MP, in his constituency – and even helped found an ironically named Non Group of MPs which, by definition, did not meet much. He was still active in the Lords until his death, voting and seeking to speak via Zoom, within the last week of his life.
Born and raised in Sutton, Surrey, he came from a profoundly political household. He was the third and youngest child of Charles Judd, the first director general of the United Nations Association, and Helen Judd (nee Ashcroft), a lecturer at the London School of Economics, who became a Labour councillor and a magistrate. Her father was a Church of Scotland minister and her parents had been missionaries in India. Frank was educated at the City of London school and joined the Labour party aged 15. He read sociology and economics at the LSE and was more interested in student politics than academic endeavour. He was president of the UN Student Association in the UK and was released early from national service in the RAF to become Labour’s youngest candidate in the 1959 general election. He fought the safe Conservative seat of Sutton and Cheam, the constituency of his birth and where his mother had fought in the post-war 1945 election. Although he had not considered a parliamentary career, the contest gave him a taste for the hustings and Labour politics. He admitted, however, in an interview for the British Library’s History of Parliament Oral History Project in 2012, that he felt conflicted by the contrast between his own relatively comfortable background and that of others from working-class homes more normally associated with authentic Labour values. He also regretted his party’s failure to tackle the inequalities created by private education. Judd was involved with a number of universities, including the LSE, where he was a governor for 30 years until 2012, and the universities of Lancaster, Newcastle and Portsmouth. He was president of the YMCA (1996-2005) and worked with a number of charities, notably in Cumbria, where he lived. In 1961 he married Chris (Christine) Willington. She survives him, along with their daughters, Liz and Pippa, three grandchildren, and his sister Nan. • Frank Ashcroft Judd, Lord Judd, politician, born 28 March 1935; died 17 April 2021