Following his electoral defeat in 2005, McWalter established an educational consultancy business offering one to one tuition in mathematics and the sciences.
[1] McWalter served as a Labour councillor on North Hertfordshire District Council from the 1979 election until 1983, representing the Letchworth East ward.
[3] Early in his Westminster career, McWalter was one of a number of Labour MPs who petitioned for a planned cut in single-parents benefits, scheduled by the previous Conservative administration, to be cancelled before it came into effect.
McWalter served on the Northern Ireland select committee during the extraordinary period before and after the Good Friday Agreement.
McWalter later claimed that he was annoyed by the constant theme in government that seemed to suggest that the main justification for a policy was that it was "modern".
McWalter also claimed that the prime minister had had four days' notice of the question, and that his only motive was to get a carefully thought-out and principled response.
It attracted independent laudatory notes from Bernard Williams and Simon Blackburn (professors of philosophy at Oxford and Cambridge respectively).
Following the report McWalter hosted a "Science for Africa" debate, but he could not extract from the Minister an agreement to work to change research council structures.
McWalter was one of the one hundred and thirty nine Labour MPs who voted against the principal resolution on the Iraq war on 20 March 2003.