My grandfather, John Barratt, who has died aged 89, was a local government leader who served as chief executive of Cambridgeshire county council. When he took on that newly created role in 1973, he was the youngest council chief executive in Britain at 40. He served until 1986, including a secondment to Zimbabwe in 1980 to oversee local elections following the end of white minority rule in what was then Rhodesia.
After his retirement from the council, he led numerous public inquiries, notably into the Bradford riots of 1995 and the Barratt inquiry of 1996, which found that the London borough of Westminster failed to exercise proper standards of the management of asbestos in some of its tower blocks.
