Roberto Campos

Roberto de Oliveira Campos, politician and diplomat: born Cuiabá, Brazil 17 April 1917; Ambassador to the US 1961-63; Minister for State Planning 1964-67; Ambassador to the UK 1975-82; Hon GCVO 1976; married (two sons, one daughter); died Rio de Janeiro 9 October 2001.

Roberto Campos was the well- remembered Brazilian ambassador to the Court of St James from 1975 until after the Falklands war in 1982. But he was far, far more than that. "Apostle of the Free Market" the Jornal do Brazil calls him, and indeed Campos was one of the main architects – perhaps the main architect, in his own view – of the "Brazilian miracle", the economic action by government in the 1970s which transformed a country dependent on exports of coffee, sugar and cocoa into a rising industrial power, becoming the eighth largest economy in the world.

He invented "indexation", a system of monetary upward changes, which certainly led to huge development, in an inflationary situation. As his great friend David, second Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, who was Chairman of the British Brazilian Chamber of Commerce at the time, recalls, "Roberto is one of the very few foreigners who have invented words for the English language."

Roberto de Oliveira Campos was born in Mato Grosso, one of the great states of the Amazon, in 1917. His father was a teacher who had gone to the outback, idealistically; his mother earned money as a seamstress and instilled into him the work ethic. In his middle teens, he enrolled himself in a Catholic seminary at Guaxupé. He went on to graduate in philosophy and theology at the seminary of Belo Horizonte, but left to become not a priest but a teacher in a small town in the state of São Paulo. He told me:

It was just as well that I didn't become a priest, because I wouldn't have made a good priest at all. I was too much of an intellectual rebel.

Campos had sympathy for many of the radical priests in South America, although some of their economic views on state control were anathema to him. He was, however, a great friend of Dom Ivo Lorscheider, later to be the powerful Cardinal Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro, who took a moderate line in the troubles of the South American church.

At the age of 22 Campos joined the then small Brazilian diplomatic service and was sent to study and work in the United States. After gaining a degree at George Washington University he undertook postgraduate work at Columbia and was befriended by the Professor of Economics James Waterhouse Angell, the monetary economist who wrote on international price theory and business cycles.

His break came when he participated on behalf of the Brazilian government in important economic conferences, especially the 1944 meeting in Bretton Woods which created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He told me how lucky he was to be able to spend time in that wonderful New Hampshire setting talking to such senior figures as John Maynard Keynes and the US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jnr.

He was a member of the Brazil United States Commission for Economic Development in the 1950s; he was founder of and held key positions in the Brazilian National Bank for Economic Development. He became known for his conservative economic views, favouring little intervention and few restrictions on capital investment. An advocate of inter-American co-operation, he was an early member of the Alliance for Progress, a US programme started under the Kennedy administration in the social and economic development of Latin America.

Campos became a key economic adviser to two successive Brazilian presidents, Getulio Vargas and Juscelino Kubitschek. Playing a central role in the organisation of the state oil company, Petrobras, and the government-run National Bank for Economic Development which he chaired in 1958 and 1959, Campos became well known on the international circuit. In 1961, aged 44, he was chosen as Brazilian ambassador to the US. After the normal three-year tour he said sadly that he was a "herald without a voice", serving a left-wing government with which he was uncomfortable, headed by President João Goulart.

He was a good deal more comfortable under the right-wing military government that followed who appointed him in 1975 as ambassador to London. Frequently he was asked to lecture in his own right as a famous economist on reform of the tax system, on organising workers' benefits systems and the desirability of a national housing bank. A superbly engaging lecturer, he pulled off many coups an orthodox ambassador would never have dreamt of.

I suspect that London had some idea of his style before he ever was appointed to the Court of St James. In 1972 Canning House and the Foreign Office had arranged a major and sedate economic conference. The organisers were on tenterhooks that the then Brazilian Minister of Planning, their star speaker, had not arrived. Campos emerged from the last possible plane and was taken to his hotel, where his hosts supposed he would tumble into bed for a good night's sleep. Not a bit of it. Campos insisted forthwith on being taken to a night-club, where he remained until the small hours of the morning. Next day he delivered a quite brilliant keynote speech.

I got to know Roberto Campos well during the time in which I was a critic of Margaret Thatcher's Falklands war. Campos was very divided in his own mind. He liked the British government and detested the Argentine generals and gave covert help to British military endeavours to regain the Falklands. On the other hand he took the view of his Brazilian friends that, however awful the Argentina Junta, Europeans should understand that the Malvinas had far more to do with Latin America than with Europe 8,000 miles away.

Campos's commitment to free-market principles and his conviction that Brazil's lack of development stemmed not from wicked Europeans and Americans with imperialistic tendencies but from its own policy errors made him a target of the Brazilian left over many years. For his pro-American sympathies he was often referred to as "Bob Fields", the literal English translation of his name. He loved arguing with me and other Labour Party friends, who succumbed to his charm if not to his economic doctrine. "If God were a socialist, he would have made all men alike," he boomed at us. "But God is not a socialist!"

Possibly more than any other single man Campos, ironically, was responsible for a stupendous act of central government direction – the shifting of the capital city of Brazil from cosmopolitan, beautiful Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia, then in the middle of nowhere. From London he returned to Brazil to win a place as a member of the Senate and latterly won a seat in Rio de Janeiro as a Federal Deputy. He had that quality, defined by our doyen of British ambassadors to Brazil, Sir William Harding, of being "a man of his word and one who put his country's case most effectively".

His resilience was extraordinary. He was once stabbed at the entrance to his apartment in São Paulo – as the Brazilian press waggishly put it, by one of his ex-ladies. Nothing – but nothing – daunted the redoubtable Roberto Campos, who left an imprint wherever he went.

Tam Dalyell