Lord Tonypandy, George Thomas, at home in Cardiff. The 1st Viscount Tonypandy was elected Speaker of the House in 1976.
Throughout Thomas’s adult life, it seems he harboured a dark personal secret; one which he took to his grave. Quite how dark remains the subject of police investigations today, 18 years after his passing was marked by universally reverential obituaries.
Last month, it emerged that a man had come forward to tell police he had been sexually assaulted on that Aberystwyth train in 1959.
The fellow passenger who had abused him, he said, was none other than George Thomas MP, the future Viscount Tonypandy. The alleged victim was 22 years old at the time.
That allegation came less than a year after it was claimed that Thomas had raped a nine-year-old son of Welsh Labour activists. The first alleged abuse of the boy took place in the late Sixties — a time when Thomas was being described in print as ‘the best-loved man in the House of Commons’.
