Obituaries - a Tory who defected to Labour, a former Guatemalan leader and a drummer who helped give James Brown his sound

Lord Temple-Morris was MP for Leominster in Herefordshire from 1974 to 2001, when he was made a life peer after standing down from the House of Commons at the election.

He was appointed Lord Fowler's parliamentary private secretary in 1979 and served on a number of Commons select committees, but never achieved ministerial office.

A One Nation Conservative and europhile, he was a supporter of Michael Heseltine and found himself out of kilter with the direction of the Tory Party under William Hague following Tony Blair's landslide Labour victory.

He was suspended from the Conservative parliamentary party and sat briefly on the Government benches as an Independent One Nation Conservative before joining Labour in 1998.

Born in Cardiff the son of a Conservative MP, Temple-Morris was educated at Malvern College and Cambridge University, where he was chairman of the Conservative Association.

He was called to the bar in 1962 and continued to work as a barrister while an MP.

THE former Guatemalan leader Alvaro Arzu, who has died aged 72, was the president who signed the 1996 peace accord, thus ending the country's civil war.

Arzu was one of the country's most influential politicians and was the mayor of Guatemala City at the time of his death. Arzu's son is the president of Congress.

Arzu served as the country’s 32nd president from 1996 to 2000. Although as president he signed the final peace accords that ended the country’s civil war, he did not negotiate them. The accords resulted from seven years of negotiations involving the UN, the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches and neighbouring Latin American governments, as well as Guatemalan organizations that had engaged in a stop-start dialogue for years.

A number of accords had been signed by the time Mr Arzu took office, although he played a role in completing the final negotiation by bringing the business community as well as prominent Social Democrats into the talks.

The civil war began in 1960 with a failed uprising by leftists against a military-led government and government repression of social movements. More than 200,000 people were killed during the war, according to a United Nations-backed human rights commission. The commission found that a vast majority of the human rights violations had been perpetrated by state forces and military groups.

Last year, prosecutors accused Arzu of campaign finance violations in which companies funneled money through his Unionist party.

THE musician John "Jabo" Starks, who has died aged 79, was one of the drummers who gave funk singer James Brown his driving beat. Starks and fellow drummer Clyde Stubblefield were the backbone of Brown's rhythm section in the late '60s and early '70s.

Rolling Stone magazine has ranked the Starks-Stubblefield combination among the greatest drummers of all time.

Starks was born in Jackson, Alabama, and grew up listening to blues and gospel music and began playing drums in his school band. He and Stubblefield combined on some of Brown's best-known recordings, with Starks performing on hits including Sex Machine and Super Bad.

"You have to understand this: We're two different drummers," Starks said in 2015. "Clyde plays the way that Clyde plays, which, nobody's gonna play like Clyde. I play like I play. We can play the same tune, but different ways. You never played together on James' shows, but when he wanted to hear something different from Clyde, he'd point to me."

After gigs that included touring with blues legend B.B. King, Starks reunited with Stubblefield two decades ago. The two toured for years as the FunkMasters.