FORMER Swindon MP David Stoddart has died after a short illness.

The politician, who sat as the town’s Member of Parliament from 1970 to 1983, was aged 94.

Tributes have been paid to the Labour parliamentarian, who was raised to the peerage after losing his Commons seat in 1983.

Robert Buckland, the current South Swindon MP and Justice Secretary, said: “I was very sorry to hear the news of Lord Stoddart’s death. I used to speak to him regularly in Parliament, where he made a distinctive contribution to proceedings, latterly in the House of Lords.

“David was always interested to hear about events in our town, which he represented for just over a dozen years.”

Coun Jim Grant, leader of the Labour group on Swindon Borough Council, sad of Lord Stoddart: “He was a great friend to Swindon who was opposed to our membership of the EU long before it became fashionable. He was a well-respected MP who stood up for Swindon.”

A former colleague in the House of Lords, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, said: “We have lost a truly great and generous man.”

Swindon Advertiser:

Lord Stoddart in 1983

Journalist Peter Hitchens, a former Adver reporter, tweeted: "RIP David Stoddart (Lord Stoddart) a proper Labour man, a miner's son, who became an MP through grammar school and hard work. Remember him from when he was MP for Swindon and I was a junior reporter on the Swindon Evening Advertiser."

Born in the Rhondda Valley, south Wales, in 1926, Lord Stoddart was a councillor in Reading before unsuccessfully standing for the Swindon seat at the 1969.

A year later, he turned Swindon red seven months after Conservative Christopher Ward had taken the town in a by-election triggered by the resignation of Labour MP Francis Noel-Baker. The General Election was won by Tory Edward Heath.

While an MP, David Stoddart – as he was then – served as a Labour whip and, later, a party industry spokesman.

He lost his seat in Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative landslide of 1983, but within months was sitting in the House of Lords as a life peer. He held the title Lord Stoddart of Swindon.

In 2002, he was expelled from the Labour Party after lending his support to a Socialist Alliance candidate during the General Election a year earlier. The peer had been angered by the party’s to parachute a Conservative Party defector, Shaun Woodward, into safe seat of St Helens South.

A Eurosceptic, he was a prominent Brexiteer. In 2008, he accused the Labour government on reneging on a deal to hold a referendum on the EU (Amendment) Bill, calling the decision “foolish”.

In 2018, two years after the Brexit referendum, he accused fellow peers of “acting in a mischievous and dangerous way”, after hundreds of amendments were tabled to the EU withdrawal bill during House of Lords debates.

He had not participated in debates in recent months. However, his interest in Swindon continued. In a written question of ministers in May 2019, Lord Stoddart asked whether the government had spoken to Honda about producing electric vehicles at its South Marston plant.

He is survived by his wife, Jennifer, two children, five grandchildren and a great-grandchild.