Education
Lord Lea was educated at Farnham Grammar School and Christ"s College, Cambridge, where he studied economics.
Lord Lea was educated at Farnham Grammar School and Christ"s College, Cambridge, where he studied economics.
He joined the Trades Union Congress in 1964 as a research officer, became Head of the Economic Department, then Assistant General Secretary from 1978 until 1999, when he joined the House of Lords. Appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in the 1978 New Year Honours, Lea was made a Labour Life peer taking the title Baron Lea of Crondall, of Crondall in the County of Hampshire on 20 July 1999. Lord Lea made headlines in April of 2013 when he publicly claimed that fellow peer and former MI6 officer Daphne Park (Baroness Park of Monmouth) admitted to him shortly before her death that the British government had had a role in the 1961 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.
Whilst at the Trades Union Congress, he was secretary of the Trades Union Congress-Labour Party Liaison Committee from 1972 to 1994, a member of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth from 1974 until 1979, the Delors Committee on Economic and Social Concepts in the Community 1977 to 1979, the Kreisky Commission on Unemployment in Europe 1986-1989, a member of the Working Party on Economic and Social Concepts in the European Economic Community and a Vice President of the European Trades Union Congress.