Obituary: Sir George Sinclair (original) (raw)

Sir George Sinclair, who has died aged 92, was an outstanding deputy governor of Cyprus during the EOKA troubles in the late 1950s, going on to become a Conservative MP who followed his conscience. Because he opposed racism and supported easier divorce and abortion, rightwing activists in Sinclair's Dorking constituency, which he represented from 1964 to 1979, thought him too leftwing and tried to have him replaced. Yet he was an anti-communist who urged the sending of British troops to Vietnam and strongly opposed both homosexual law reform and the ending of capital punishment.

The link that held these contradictions together was Sinclair's 26 years in the colonial service, which he saw as an enlightened defender of British interests as the empire evolved into the developing world. Having supervised the execution of thieves in West Africa and "terrorists" in Cyprus, he did not find capital punishment unacceptable. And having been embarrassed by homosexual scandal in the colonial service in West Africa and Cyprus, he did not want to encourage gays in the UK.

Sinclair was one of those Scots who manned the ramparts of the empire. His father was a Cable & Wireless executive who became its general manager for India; his brother became general manager of Burma Shell.

When Sinclair was young, his father's work took the family to Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). "I went to a mixed school, with Tamils, Burghers (of part Dutch origin) and Singhalese, when I was very young." His father was soon posted back to Cornwall, where Sinclair attended a small school run by the local vicar's daughter; his first wife-to-be, Katharine Burdekin, was one of 10 pupils. After Abingdon school in Berkshire, he took an honours degree in greats at Pembroke College, Oxford.

In 1935 his decision to enter the colonial administrative service defined his life for the next quarter century. He returned to Oxford for a postgraduate year, largely to study Ashanti, and then was posted as an assistant district commissioner of an interior district of the Gold Coast, as Ghana was then known.

One of a wave of slightly paternalistic idealists, he avoided the gloomy bungalow set aside for British officials and slept in a corner of the council chamber of "his" village, eating food from roadside stalls. He persuaded villagers they needed a school.

When the second world war came, he joined the Royal West African Frontier Force and was effective in recruiting Ghanaians. Although he wanted to fight alongside them, he was posted back to Britain, where he married his childhood sweetheart, Katharine, in 1941.

In 1943 he was assigned as secretary to the commission on higher education in western Africa (the commission was headed by the distinguished Conservative MP, Walter Elliot, who convinced Sinclair that he was a Tory). The original idea was for a single university for all of West Africa. Sinclair initially agreed with this plan. But African nationalists wanted a separate university for each country, with which Sinclair later agreed. Back in the Gold Coast in 1945, he spent much of his time agitating for a national university and even found a site for it.

As one of the first civil servants to realise Ghana was soon to be independent, he was promoted to an assistant colonial secretary in 1947 and principal assistant colonial secretary in 1950. Sinclair first met independent Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, when Sinclair had him arrested for an illegal general strike. Later he would begin to write speeches for the "irresponsible" nationalist turned statesman.

Sinclair's success in Ghana was the springboard for his selection by Field Marshal Sir John Harding to underpin him as deputy governor (1955-60) in Cyprus, where Greek nationalists were trying to seize power from Britain against the wishes of its Turkish minority. Because this conflict involved Greece, Turkey and Britain, the governor was frequently and necessarily absent from the island, leaving Sinclair as the top British official in charge. He, like his bosses, survived bomb attempts and was featured in "dead or alive" posters on telephone poles.

Unlike Ghana, there was not a single national movement, but two contenders: Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. Sinclair changed from being a moderator of a single nationalist movement to siding with the then less-demanding Turks. He identified with the British army and its task in combatting EOKA, the pro-independence resistance movement, and was quite happy to arrest Archbishop Makarios, who supported uniting Cyprus with Greece, and exile him to the Seychelle islands.

Sinclair was less than happy when Harding was replaced by the more enlightened Sir Hugh Foot (later Lord Caradon), sent to Cyprus to come to terms with Makarios. Sinclair insisted Britain should retain its sovereign bases on the island, and the Colonial Office sided with him. In 1960, when his Cyprus stint was over, he was knighted. He retired from the Colonial Office the following year, at 49.

Sinclair mistakenly thought he could prance into any vacant Tory seat. He tried several times to enter Westminster before he was elected for the safe constituency of Dorking by a 14,056 majority in 1964.

On Commonwealth immigration, he urged strong curbs, yet he went on to support the Labour government's race relations act (1968), which made discrimination in housing, employment or public services illegal. He also backed prime minister Harold Wilson's visit to Africa to try to prevent Ian Smith, the white minority's leader in Rhodesia, from declaring independence unilaterally, saying: "We cannot contemplate abandoning the interests of four million Africans." He also attacked an increase of 300% in university fees for overseas students because it would curb the arrival of Commonwealth students.

In anti-communist mode, in 1967 Sinclair urged the dispatch of British troops to fight alongside Australians and New Zealanders on the US side in Vietnam. He confused his rightwing anti-communist friends when he became the unofficial Tory Whip supporting Labour's Leo Abse in his divorce reform bill of 1968.

When the Conservatives narrowly recaptured power in 1970, Sinclair was disappointed not to be given office in Edward Heath's government in his specialised field - as a pro-European he had been a Heath supporter. But Heath decided to fold the Commonwealth Office into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and limit its ministerial numbers.

Sinclair's wife Katharine died in 1971. He married Mary Sawday in 1972. She survives him, as do a son and three daughters from his first marriage.

· George Evelyn Sinclair, politician and colonial civil servant, born November 6 1912; died September 21 2005