Woodrow Wyatt

Woodrow Lyle Wyatt, Baron Wyatt of Weeford (4 July 1918 – 7 December 1997) was a British politician, published author, journalist and broadcaster, close to the Queen Mother, Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch. For the last 20 years of his life, he was chairman of the state betting organisation The Tote.

Born in Kingston upon Thames, Wyatt was the second son of Robert Harvey Lyle Wyatt, the founder and headmaster of Milbourne Lodge School, Esher and his wife Ethel (née Morgan), Wyatt was educated at Eastbourne College and Worcester College, Oxford. He served throughout the Second World War with the Suffolk Regiment and rose to the rank of major. Wyatt was mentioned in despatches from Normandy.

Wyatt was elected to Parliament in 1945 as the Labour MP for Birmingham Aston, and served until the 1955 general election when the constituencies boundaries were redrawn. During the Cabinet Mission to India in 1946 he served as an informal liaison officer between the Mission and the Muslim League. Wyatt was briefly a junior minister in Clement Attlee's final administration in 1951 but thereafter was never in office.

Following the splitting of his Aston seat, Wyatt was unable to find a more promising option than the Conservative held Grantham constituency, which he nonetheless fought in 1955, being defeated by 2,375 votes. During his period out of parliament, Wyatt was a reporter for the BBC's Panorama current affairs programme, in which a November 1957 report of Wyatt's revealed ballot rigging in the then communist-influenced Electrical Trades Union (ETU).

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