35 Facts About Woodrow Wyatt

Woodrow Lyle Wyatt, Baron Wyatt of Weeford was a British politician, author, journalist and broadcaster, close to the Queen Mother, Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch.

Woodrow Wyatt was educated at Eastbourne College and Worcester College, Oxford, where he read jurisprudence and graduated with a second-class degree in 1939.

Woodrow Wyatt volunteered for military service ten days before the outbreak of the Second World War with the Suffolk Regiment and rose to the rank of major.

Woodrow Wyatt was posted to Normandy on D-Day plus one and was mentioned in despatches.

Woodrow Wyatt was nearly court-martialled after an acrimonious exchange with one of his senior officers.

Woodrow Wyatt was elected to Parliament in 1945 as the Labour MP for Birmingham Aston, and retained the seat until the 1955 general election.

Woodrow Wyatt was a member of the 15-strong Keep Left group of Labour MPs.

Woodrow Wyatt asked Wyatt to join Richard Dimbleby in presenting Panorama as the programme's foreign affairs reporter.

Woodrow Wyatt later wrote: "The threat to the economy and to the Labour Party of a huge AEU block vote supporting extremist policies at Labour conferences, was obvious".

The Director-General of the BBC, Sir Ian Jacob, authorised Woodrow Wyatt to produce a Panorama programme on it, which was broadcast on 14 May 1956.

In June 1957 Woodrow Wyatt visited South Africa under apartheid for Panorama.

Woodrow Wyatt later wrote that the treatment of black South Africans was "worse than that of slaves in Ancient Athens or Rome" and that his programme was "the first time that millions in Britain got a glimpse of what life was really like in South Africa: paradise under a live volcano".

Woodrow Wyatt received the permission of Ian Jacob to make a Panorama programme on union democracy in the ETU.

In January 1958 Woodrow Wyatt wrote an article on the subject for the New Statesman.

Woodrow Wyatt campaigned in favour of compulsory secret ballots for union elections, which was eventually embodied in the Employment Act 1988.

In January 1958 the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party rejected a request from the Holborn and St Pancras constituency Labour Party that Woodrow Wyatt should be removed from the list of prospective parliamentary candidates due to his "anti-working class activity".

Woodrow Wyatt was a close figure within the Information Research Department, a secret branch of the Foreign Office dedicated to publishing misinformation, pro-colonial, and anti-communist propaganda.

The IRD used bribes to convince Woodrow Wyatt to publish anti-communist propaganda, which the IRD would boost by using British diplomatic missions for distribution.

Woodrow Wyatt returned to Parliament in 1959 as member for Bosworth, Leicestershire.

Woodrow Wyatt was seen by some as a maverick and by others as a man of firm convictions which made him temperamentally unsuited to 'toeing the party line'.

Woodrow Wyatt was a prolific journalist, with a diverse range of interests, and by the late 1970s he had crossed the political spectrum and became an admirer of Margaret Thatcher.

Woodrow Wyatt's column reached an audience of approximately seventeen million readers.

Woodrow Wyatt interviewed President Botha and put to him that he should unban the ANC.

Woodrow Wyatt was knighted in 1983 and was created a life peer on 3 February 1987 with the title Baron Wyatt of Weeford, of Weeford in the County of Staffordshire.

The Woodrow Wyatt family had lived at Weeford in the seventeenth century.

Woodrow Wyatt set up a newspaper and printing business with his third wife, which soon failed.

Woodrow Wyatt said that although Britain's Asian and black population were "generally well behaved", a substantial part of the latter were "lawless, drug-taking, violent and unemployable".

Andrew Neil in the New Statesman wrote of the diaries: "Woodrow Wyatt has done the country a service in giving us the unalloyed truth about how this country's governing and social elite still operates", and the Daily Express called the journals "The most explosive political memoirs of modern times".

Woodrow Wyatt arranged for cousins to take care of his first child when his wife made it clear she was not interested in doing so.

Woodrow Wyatt leased for a time the 18th-century house known as Conock Old Manor, near Devizes in Wiltshire; he was living there in 1970.

Woodrow Wyatt was a first cousin of England Test cricketer Bob Woodrow Wyatt.

Woodrow Wyatt was a descendant of the architectural Wyatt family.

Woodrow Wyatt was first cousin to Honor Wyatt, the mother of musician Robert Wyatt, whose alliance with the Communist Party of Great Britain, juxtaposed with Woodrow Wyatt's right-wing politics, led to Robert Wyatt referring to his relative as an "appalling man with a sadistic sense of superiority".

Woodrow Wyatt died in Camden, north London, on 7 December 1997 aged 79.

Woodrow Wyatt is buried in St Mary's churchyard in Weeford, just south of Lichfield, Staffordshire, where the Wyatt family originated.