He retired from Parliament in June 1983 and, on 11th July 1983 by Letters Patent, was elevated to the peerage as Viscount Tonypandy, of Rhondda in the County of Mid Glamorgan.

They were less pleased when Emma had to take her marriage certificate to court to prove she was Zachariah's wife and not the woman in Kent to whom he had allocated his soldier allowance.

[3] Thomas was raised by his mother in the village of Trealaw in South Wales, just across the Rhondda Fawr river from the town of Tonypandy.

[5] When the government ultimately acceded to the demands for removal, it took £150,000 from the Aberfan relief fund – raised to help the victims of the disaster and their families – in part payment of the costs.

Just over 30 years later, the money was refunded by the newly appointed Secretary of State for Wales Ron Davies who described it as, "a wrong that needed to be righted.

Thomas was fervently attached to the Royal Family and also strongly opposed to Plaid Cymru, and particularly to the Welsh Language Society.

[7] The same year he was the subject of the television show This Is Your Life, when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at London's Royal Albert Hall, ahead of a charity concert for the National Children's Homes.

During that year, he also gave his very high-profile endorsement of Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum Party, believing that the European Union was compromising the sovereignty of Parliament.

[11] After Lord Tonypandy's death, former Welsh Labour MP Leo Abse revealed that Thomas had been homosexual and had been blackmailed because of it.

Abse, the MP who introduced the private member's bill which partially decriminalised homosexuality in Britain, discussed this incident in his book Tony Blair: The Man Behind the Smile.

[15] Abse wrote that, while being otherwise a tough and fearless politician, Thomas would "dangerously over-react and panic if there was the slightest sign of a crack in the thin ice upon which he skated all this life ...

In July 2014, British media carried reports that the South Wales Police were investigating allegations that Thomas had sexually abused a boy aged nine in the late 1960s.