Woodrow Wyatt - Writing

Writing

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. During this period his News of the World column, 'The Voice of Reason', was regularly attacked by Thatcher's political opponents, who in latter years dubbed it 'The Voice of Alzheimers'. His caustic, candid and mischievously indiscreet diaries were published posthumously in three volumes. He was knighted in 1983 and became a life peer as Baron Wyatt of Weeford, of Weeford in the County of Staffordshire in 1987.

Wyatt edited ten volumes of English Story (1940–50). His books include two autobiographies, Into the Dangerous World (1952) and Confessions of an Optimist (1985). The three volumes of his diaries (published posthumously as The Journals of Woodrow Wyatt by Macmillan, edited by Sarah Curtis) were: volume 1 1985-88 (1998) ISBN 0-333-74166-8; volume 2 'Thatcher's Fall and Major's Rise', 1989–92, (1999) ISBN 0-333-77405-1; volume 3 'From Major to Blair', 1992 until three months before his death in December 1997, (2000) ISBN 0-333-77406-X. Andrew Neil in the New Statesman wrote, "Wyatt has done the country a service in giving us the unalloyed truth about how this country's governing and social elite still operates", and the Daily Express called the journals "The most explosive political memoirs of modern times". However, the historian Robert Rhodes James "advised caution in believing them. 'Even if the diarist is not attempting to give a deliberately false version, a talented writer can easily over-dramatise...' There is plenty of internal evidence that Wyatt should be approached with a similar caution." Robert Blake, Baron Blake, the Tory historian, called Wyatt a "notorious liar".

In 2000 the journalist Petronella Wyatt, his daughter by his fourth marriage, published a book entitled Father, Dear Father: Life with Woodrow Wyatt (ISBN 0-09-929760-4) which is an "affectionate portrait of the last great English eccentric" and has many personal and historically significant anecdotes .