Denis Carter, Baron Carter

For other people of the same name, see Lord Carter (disambiguation).

The Right Honourable The Lord Carter PC
Chief Whip in the House of Lords Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms
In office 2 May 1997 – 29 May 2002
Prime Minister	Tony Blair
Preceded by	The Lord Strathclyde
Succeeded by	The Lord Grocott
Personal details
Born	17 January 1932(1932-01-17) Elephant and Castle, United Kingdom
Died	18 December 2006(2006-12-18) (aged 74) London, United Kingdom
Political party	Labour Co-operative
Spouse(s)	Teresa Greengoe (1957–2006)
Children	Andrew Catherine
Alma mater	Worcester College, Oxford
Religion	Roman Catholicism

Denis Victor Carter, Baron Carter PC (17 January 1932 - 18 December 2006) was a British agriculturalist and Labour Co-operative politician.

Carter was born in Elephant and Castle in London, where his parents, Albert and Annie Carter, worked in a tea warehouse and as an office cleaner, respectively. They later moved to Hove to run a sweetshop, and he was educated at the Jesuit Xaverian College in Brighton. He did national service in the Suez Canal^[1] Zone in Egypt from 1950 to 1952, and then studied at the East Sussex Institute of Agriculture and the Essex Institute of Agriculture, where he obtained a national diploma in agriculture, winning the Queen's Award for the country's highest marks. He later studied at Oxford, gaining a B.Litt. In 1957, he founded Agricultural Accounting and Management (AKC Ltd), which grew to manage and handle the accounting for a large number of farms, mainly in southern England and averaging 1,300 acres (5 km²). In 1968, Carter founded and then worked for 30 years with United Oilseeds, which became a substantial farm trading operation, introducing large-scale oilseed rape marketing into Britain, and with WE & DT Cave, which raised thousands of pigs in Wiltshire.

Carter stood for Parliament in Basingstoke at the 1970 general election, without success, defeated by Conservative politician David Mitchell.

He was nominated as a Labour "working peer" by Neil Kinnock, and raised to a life peerage as Baron Carter, of Devizes in the County of Wiltshire, on 23 March 1987. In opposition, he was Labour spokesman on social security in the House of Lords from 1988 to 1990, and on health from 1989 to 1992. He was also an opposition whip from 1987, and deputy chief whip from 1990 to 1992.

He was appointed Captain of the Gentlemen-at-Arms in the House of Lords when the Labour gained power in 1997, the post usually bestowed upon the Government Chief Whip in the Lords, and joined the Privy Council of the United Kingdom. He also chaired the BBC Rural Affairs and Agriculture Committee for five years from 1985, and in 1993 was appointed to chair the UK Co-operative Council. As the government chief whip in the House of Lords, he steered the governments ambitious programme of legislation, including the Human Rights Act, through the Lords, and was involved in the negotiations over the reform of the House of Lords that led to the compromise in the House of Lords Act 1999, which retained 92 hereditary peers in the first stage of reform.

He was President of the Institute of Agricultural Management from 1996 to 1997, a post to which he returned from 2002 to 2006.

Denis Carter married Teresa Greengoe in 1957; both their children predeceased him, a son Andrew at the age of 19 in 1982 and a daughter Catherine at the age of 44 in 2004. As a result of this, the parents set up the Andrew and Catherine Carter Foundation Trust to help disabled people. He was made an honorary member of the Royal Society of Psychiatrists in recognition of his work for the disabled. He died of cancer.

References

1. ^ The Times, Register, page 62, 21 December 2006

External links

• Government Whips' Office in House of Lords
• Obituary, The Daily Telegraph, 20 December 2006
• Obituary, The Independent, 20 December 2006
• Obituary, The Guardian, 22 December 2006

Political offices
Preceded by The Lord Strathclyde	Chief Whip in the House of Lords 1997–2002	Succeeded by The Lord Grocott
	Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms 1997–2002

Persondata
Name	Carter, Denis
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	17 January 1932
Place of birth	Elephant and Castle, United Kingdom
Date of death	18 December 2006
Place of death	London, United Kingdom