profile of the first black Tory peer - Telegraph.co.uk

Undeterred, he built up a successful career, which brought with it a £100,000 a year salary and the security to buy a family home in Ealing, west London, for his wife and three children.

Turning his hand to local politics, he became active in his local council and went on to beat 300 other candidates to become the Conservative candidate for Cheltenham at the 1992 general election.

During the campaign, he encountered overtly racist opposition including death threats, while one Tory voter wrote to a local paper: "I really don't think we should give in to a bloody n----- even though Central Office have foisted him on us. We're here to repel the invader."

He lost by 1,000 votes, but his highly publicised campaign brought him to the attention of senior figures in the Conservative party and gave him a certain public standing.

He went into television, appearing on programmes such as GMTV to offer legal advice to viewers, before becoming a producer at the BBC and working for charity.

It was, he says, out of the blue that he received the offer of a life peerage from John Major, then prime minister, in 1996.

He quickly found himself moving in rarified circles, rubbing shoulders with wealthy, hereditary peers.

As Lord Taylor of Warwick, and the first black peer in the House of Lords, he claimed he found his new surroundings strange, more of a "place for the retired and the rich" as he put it.

But he had many supporters, including Lord Tebbit who once predicted Lord Taylor would eventually become a Cabinet minister.

Others in the House of Lords recalled a slightly more distant character. Lord Colwyn, the Deputy Speaker, told how although he shared a love of

jazz with Lord Taylor, he rarely socialised with the other peers.

"Lord Taylor kept himself to himself. Over the years I had suggested to his PA that it might be a good idea if he came and joined Long Table for a cup of tea."

What Lord Taylor may not have realised at first was the lack of remuneration for his services to the House of Lords.

Most of those who attended gave up their other jobs for the privilege of being a peer, knowing they would receive no formal income for their time.

As the new boy in the establishment, and receiving an estimated income of £30,000, he asked for advice on expenses and allowances.

He claims he was told that the daily allowance, the overnight subsistence, the office allowance and travel expenses were in lieu of a salary.

Lord Taylor said the peers complained bitterly about the lack of formal recompense for working in the House of Lords.

He was told, he said, that he would be "crazy" not to apply for overnight subsistence for having a main home in London, even if this was not the case.

All he had to do was make sure there was a family connection to the property.

It was then, in 2006, that Lord Taylor made his fatal error, taking liberties on what he insisted he thought was sound advice

For he not only did he nominate his nephew's home in Oxford to which he had no connection, he failed to tell his nephew Robert Taylor what he was doing.

Lord Taylor had no financial interest in the two bedroom property at all – it belonged to Mr Taylor's partner Tristram Wyatt, a professor at Kellogg College, Oxford.

He also failed on the main test of overnight subsistence in that the only property Lord Taylor owned or had any link was in London, well within the capital perimeter.

This cosy arrangement continued for two years, before Lord Taylor nominated his main residence as his home in Ealing.

He thought he had got away with it until contacted by The Sunday Times in 2009.

His first reaction was to panic, and he lied that his main property was his mother's home in Birmingham which he had nominated until 2007.

It was true that he had stayed in his mother's house in his early days as a peer.

However, he was undone by the fact that his mother had died in 2001 and the house had been sold shortly afterwards.

In 2009, by now divorced and about to remarry, Lord Taylor did not realise that his attempts to conceal the truth would unravel and ultimately lead to his criminal conviction.

He was interviewed by the police in March last year, but refused to answer any questions.

It did not take long before he was charged with false accounting in July 2010. Consistently denying any wrong-doing, the peer gave evidence in his seven day trial at Southwark Crown Court, determined to explain his behaviour.

Asked if he had done anything wrong, he hit the witness stand and shouted: "No I haven't! I don't want to make money, I just want to serve people. That is all I care about.

"I don't care about money. Some millionaires in the House of Lords are some of the most miserable people I have ever met.

"Money doesn't bring you anything. It's serving people that does." Asked if he thought he had been doing anything dishonest, Lord Taylor said: "It's not worth it to lose your reputation for that.

"They [his expenses claims] were made very much in good faith."

Alas, his conviction of what was right was not enough to save him.

He was appointed as a judge in 1997 and given an honorary doctorate in law by Warwick University in 1999, 13 years after entering politics as a Solihull borough councillor.