The former Labour MP for Hampstead, north London, Ben Whitaker, who has died aged 79, was the embodiment of the liberal values associated with the area. At the 1966 election he won the Hampstead seat, for 81 years a Tory fiefdom, from the reactionary former home secretary Henry Brooke, and championed the progressive social reforms of the Harold Wilson government, in which he held a number of posts. Subsequently, as a human rights lawyer long before this was a fashionable career, he made distinguished contributions to civil liberties in Britain, and especially abroad, through his leadership of the Minority Rights Group and then of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and as a UN rapporteur.
Ben was born in Nottinghamshire, the son of Major General Sir John Whitaker and his wife, Pamela (nee Snowden), who were not modern enough to avoid sending him to Eton. He subsequently did national service in the Coldstream Guards, before graduating from New College, Oxford, to the bar. After what he described as this "Victorian education", he lectured in law at London University and became outraged at the conduct of the police, who at the time were framing Stephen Ward, planting bricks on political protesters and, in Sheffield, had been caught beating suspects with rhino whips. His first book, The Police (1964), was written with the object of restricting their powers.
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