David Stoddart, Baron Stoddart of Swindon
[1] Stoddart was the Labour candidate for Newbury in 1959 and 1964, and narrowly lost at Swindon in a by-election in 1969.Stoddart became the Labour Member of Parliament for Swindon in 1970, but in 1983 he lost his seat to the Conservative Simon Coombs.Stoddart was a government whip from 1975 to 1978, Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister for Housing from 1974 to 1975 and opposition frontbench spokesman on trade and industry.[4] He was Chief Front Bench spokesman on energy 1983–1988 and served as House of Lords Whip during the same period.He was expelled from the Labour benches in the House of Lords in 2002 for backing a Socialist Alliance candidate at the 2001 general election, an action he took because he strongly opposed the parachuting of Shaun Woodward, a defector from the Conservative Party, into the safe Labour seat of St Helens South.