Obituary: Lord Brimelow

Eyebrows were raised the length of Whitehall when Sir Thomas Brimelow, Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office and Head of the Diplomatic Service, was in 1976 created a Life Peer - and took the Labour whip.

Actually, the Establishment should not have been surprised. For Tommy Brimelow, impeccably loyal as a civil servant, was a grammar-school boy with passionate convictions about equality of opportunity, and a less stratified, more European society for Great Britain in the second half of the century.

Yet there was a good excuse for surprise at Brimelow's left-wing inclinations. He was, in the words of the Konigswinter Conference organiser the late Professor Tom Mackintosh MP, "the toughest-minded and most intransigent of all the Cold Warriors". When I put this to him, late one balmy night in Strasbourg, his reply was typically laconic. "Well, you see, I was brought up under Stalin!" This was no exaggeration.

As the best Russian-speaker in the British Embassy in Moscow during the Second World War, it was the young Brimelow who was dispatched to cope face to face with the Russian dictator, who, having imbibed his vodka, was in the habit of summoning the Embassy late at night or in the early hours to convey his views to Churchill and the British government. It was an awesome cauldron for a 27/30-year old. But it forged a person of whom Lord Greenhill of Harrow, a former Permanent Secretary to the Foreign Office, could say in responding to his maiden speech in the House of Lords over 30 years later: "I hope he will intervene on future occasions, and particularly when matters concerning the Soviet Union are discussed, because there is no greater authority in the House than he, and indeed I think no greater authority in this country."

Thomas Brimelow was born of a Derbyshire yeoman father and a Scots mother. At New Hills Grammar School he excelled at both Mathematics and Greek, and won a scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford, in 1933; it gave him especial pleasure that exactly 40 years later, the college elected him as an Honorary Fellow. In days when the Foreign Office tended to recruit public schoolboys, Brimelow gained entry to the consular section of the diplomatic service, and was made a Probationer Vice-Consul; the place was Danzig and the year 1938-39. Later, he regarded this posting as a stroke of incredible luck. At 23, he was propelled into the centre of momentous events. In 1939, he was ordered up the coast to Riga, still Latvia, and the beginning of what his younger colleagues in the European Parliament discerned as a complex love-hate relationship with Mother Russia.

Fortunately for his education and his future - "career" is inappropriate in the Brimelow context, as he was not a scheming man - he was assigned to New York for the first two years of the Second World War. Then came the formative first period in Stalin's Moscow: Molotov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Voloshilov, Timoshenko, and Zhukov - he had dealings with them all.

In 1945, Brimelow was recalled to London, after a physically grinding three years. He married Jean Cull, a Glasgow girl, who was working as one of Herbert Morrison's civil service Private Secretaries. Lady Brimelow was an exceedingly competent, charming and able lady, and a wonderfully supportive wife, who, to Lord Brimelow's scarcely concealed heartbreak, died in 1993, after months of distressing illness. She displayed a shrewd, but healthy, interest in his work - and his cultural loves. When my wife and I were at the Strasbourg parliament with the Brimelows in the late Seventies, we would consult them about places we could visit on our return journey - whether it was the cathedrals at Autun or Laon, the Brimelows were full of scholarship and fascinating information.

It was when he was based in London, as a second secretary immediately after the end of the war, that Brimelow became embroiled in a bitter controversy, the embers of which are still hot to this day. As a diplomat, Brimelow was involved in the repatriation moves for thousands of Cossacks and Yugoslavs. The policy agreed by Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta, and insisted on by Stalin, was that all Russian nationals should be returned at the end of the war. The uncomfortable fact was that many, not all, of the Cossacks had indeed fought with the German army, and that many of the Yugoslavs (mostly Croats) had been among the cruellest operatives of the SS.

The whole tragic episode flared up when Count Nikolai Tolstoy published a book, The Minister and the Massacre (1986), bitterly criticising Lord Aldington and others. A committee was set up by the Foreign Office, under the Chairmanship of Brigadier Anthony Cowgill, including the journalist Christopher Booker and Brimelow. They published a properly thought-out report on the whole horrible business, "The Repatriation from Austria in 1945." Acrimony was rife. Lord Aldington sued Count Tolstoy, in the event successfully, for libel. Brimelow devoted much of his retirement to compiling a history of the policy, devised in part by Harold Macmillan, then Minister of State, in an effort to understand it more fully.