British spy who became a Tory peer dies at age of 88

THE former MI6 spy turned Tory peer Baroness Park of Monmouth has died aged 88.

A spokeswoman for the opposition whips office in the House of Lords said she died on Wednesday night. She had been ill for some time.

During a colourful career lasting more than 30 years with MI6, Daphne Park ran agents in Moscow during the Cold War, infiltrated Hanoi during the Vietnam war, and smuggled a defector out of the Congo in the boot of her car.

After leaving the foreign service in 1979 she became principal of Somerville College, Oxford, and a BBC governor before being made a peer in 1990. In an interview in 2003, she recalled how in Vietnam she lived in a former brothel and cultivated her contacts over bottles of brandy.

Telegrams were banned so in order to file her reports she had to hitch a lift out of the country every six weeks in a battered old Dakota aircraft. "They were not supposed to shoot at it but they sometimes forgot, so it was a rather dicey trip," she remembered.

She also recounted how in the Congo she spirited the private secretary of prime minister Patrice Lumumba out of the country hidden under a blanket in the boot of her Citroen 2CV.