For 31 years, a Labour Member of Parliament, he also served as British High Commissioner in Accra and Nairobi, and later as President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

[citation needed] In 1938, they married, and lived in London where de Freitas was pursuing a career as a barrister, gaining political experience as a Labour councillor in Shoreditch, and co-leading a boys' club in Hoxton.

During the Second World War he became a squadron leader in the Royal Air Force, but returned to politics in 1945, the family living at Loughton and then Cambridge.

[citation needed] He beat the sitting Conservative MP for Nottingham Central in the 1945 election, and was appointed Parliamentary private secretary to Clement Attlee.

[6] After Accra, he was briefly in Nairobi, as British representative supporting an attempt to build a Federation of East Africa which would include Uganda, Tanganyika and Kenya.