[1][3] He volunteered for military service ten days before the outbreak of the Second World War with the Suffolk Regiment[4] and rose to the rank of major.

Wyatt regretted Ernest Bevin's "prejudice against Zionism", because "Israel might easily have been a member state of the British Commonwealth" had it not been for the war in Palestine.

Grace Wyndham Goldie, who was the head of the BBC's Current Affairs department, happened to watch the broadcast and was impressed with Wyatt.

[7][14] She asked Wyatt to join Richard Dimbleby in presenting Panorama as the programme's foreign affairs reporter.

[16] In February 1956, during the filming of a Panorama programme in Algeria, Wyatt and his television crew were attacked by French settlers who had mistaken them for Americans.

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

[25] Eric Louw, the South African Minister of External Affairs, made an official complaint to the British government about Wyatt's programme.

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

This was broadcast on 9 December 1957 and Wyatt brought to light that Les Cannon had been defrauded of his election to the ETU's Executive by Communist vote-rigging.

[30][31] Wyatt campaigned in favour of compulsory secret ballots for union elections, which was eventually embodied in the Employment Act 1988.

[33][34] Wyatt was a close figure within the Information Research Department (IRD), a secret branch of the Foreign Office dedicated to publishing misinformation, pro-colonial, and anti-communist propaganda.

[42] In November 1961, Wyatt wrote an article for The Guardian and delivered a speech in Leicester, both times advocating a Lib–Lab pact to keep the Conservatives out of power.

After ceasing to be an active politician, Wyatt was appointed by the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, as Chairman of the Horserace Totalisator Board, a post he held from 1976 to 1997.

When he became chairman, the Tote was a total mess but he put it on the map by his sheer personality and flair along with the introduction of computerisation".

[5] 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.

The strength of her determination and the simplicity of her rational ideas uncluttered by intellectual confusion convinced me that she was the first party leader I had met, apart from Gaitskell, who might check Britain's slide and possibly begin to reverse it.

[49] In July 1979, Roy Jenkins recorded in his diary after meeting Wyatt and Thatcher: "Woodrow is on very close terms with her, talks freely, easily, without self-consciousness, says anything he wants to".

[51] He claims that when Geoffrey Howe complained in his memoirs that Thatcher preferred to listen to her private "voices" rather than to her colleagues and official advisers, "it was first and foremost of Wyatt that he was thinking".

[51] During this period his News of the World column, 'The Voice of Reason', was regularly attacked by Thatcher's political opponents.

[52] During this time he was vocal in opposing sanctions against apartheid South Africa, writing that Nelson Mandela and the ANC were trying to establish "a communist-style black dictatorship".

In the mid-1980s he played a key role as Rupert Murdoch's fixer in brokering negotiations with the electricians' union, aiding News International to move to Wapping.

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".

[63] Wyatt was married four times, to: He arranged for cousins to take care of his first child when his wife made it clear she was not interested in doing so.