BARONESS Daphne Park, a former principal of the University of Oxford’s Somerville College, enjoy-ed a 30-year career with British intelligence.

A Conservative peer and former MI6 officer, Baroness Park of Monmouth died last Wednesday, aged 88.

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 conflict in Vietnam, 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, and a BBC governor before being made a peer in 1990.

Lady Park, known by some in the world of foreign intelligence as “Queen of Spies”, was principal at Somerville from 1980 to 1989, and a statement on the college website announced her death with “great sadness”.

It went on: “Baroness Park was a great Somervillian who did much for the college, both as principal and afterwards as an Honorary Fellow.”

Lady Park’s funeral will be held in the college chapel on Tuesday at 2.30pm.

There will be a memorial service in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, in High Street, on Saturday, May 29, at 2.30pm.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2003, she recalled how in Vietnam she lived in a former brothel and cultivated her contacts over a bottle 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 on 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 recalled. 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 car.

She said: “I had a little Citroen 2CV which was excellent cover – nobody ever takes 2CVs seriously.”

In the Lords, her friend and fellow former spy, the Labour peer Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale, paid tribute to Lady Park’s “wisdom and experience”.

She said: “Although we were not on the same political benches we were very old friends from shared professional experience in Government service.

“We were quite often comrades in arms about things that we cared about, such as interception and pre-charge detention.

“I have lost a very, very dear friend and the House has lost the valuable contribution of a very, very able and much-loved lady.”