Thomas Skeffington-Lodge

Thomas Cecil "Tom" Skeffington-Lodge^[1] (15 January 1905 – 23 February 1994)^[2] was a British Labour Party politician. He was Member of Parliament (MP) for Bedford from 1945 to 1950.

Family

He was from a Yorkshire farming family which owned 2,000 acres. His mother, Winifred Skeffington, was a suffragette and his father, Thomas Lodge, from the famous Lodge family, American and British.

Political career

Skeffington-Lodge fought Bedford at the 1945 general election and unexpectedly defeated the Conservative incumbent Richard Wells, by just 288 votes. He only served one term, however, before being beaten in 1950 by Winston Churchill's son-in-law Christopher Soames.

Despite never gaining election to Parliament again, Skeffington-Lodge fought a number of other elections across the country in the Labour cause. At the 1951 general election he was beaten at York by just 921 votes. He went on to fight Mid Bedfordshire in 1955, Grantham in 1959 and Brighton Pavilion in a 1969 by-election.

Outside politics

In 1969, he successfully sued novelist Francis King for libel, claiming that he had been caricatured as a female character in King's novel A Domestic Animal, which was subsequently pulped.^[3]