The Baron of Warwick, John David Beckett Taylor, was born on September 21, 1952 in Birmingham, England. Derief, a professional cricket player, and Enid, a nurse, were both born in Jamaica. Taylor attended Moseley Grammar School before going on to study English Literature and Law at Keele University before moving to London to pursue a legal career. In 1978, he was called to the Bar and began a successful career as a Barrister. He married his first wife, a pediatrician named Jean Katherine Binysh, in 1981, and they had three children.
Taylor entered politics in 1990, when he was appointed special advisor to the Home Secretary and Home Office Ministers in Prime Minister John Major’s Conservative government. He ran for the Cheltenham parliamentary seat as the Conservative candidate in 1992, but lost. Because of his race, he faced significant opposition from members of his own party. The election’s notoriety, on the other hand, provided Taylor with the opportunity to work in television, where he was invited to host a national morning show offering viewers legal advice. He later worked as a BBC producer.
Taylor was offered and accepted a life peerage from the government in 1996. Queen Elizabeth II created him Baron Taylor of Warwick in the County of Warwickshire, making him the youngest and first person of African ancestry to sit in the House of Lords. Taylor introduced a Bill in the House in 1997, which became the Criminal Evidence (Amendment) Act of 1997.
Taylor also served on a number of boards and committees, including the Greater London Further Education Funding Council, the British Board of Film Classification, and the Independent Football Commission. Several of his contemporaries perceived him as distant and uninterested in engaging with his fellow Lords.
Despite his critics, Taylor also had allies, many of whom believed and publicly asserted that he would become a Cabinet Minister in a future Conservative Government. In 1997 Taylor was appointed as a Deputy District Judge.
John Taylor has served as a Consultant for Dresdner Kleinwort Benson and Chancellor of Bournemouth University between 2001 and 2006. He is also a Director of Warwick Leadership Foundation Charity and is a patron of Kidscape and Parents for Children.
Taylor and his first wife divorced in 2005 and in 2009 he met his second wife, Yvonne Louise, an Estate Agent and part-time evangelical preacher from Florida. Their marriage lasted only 24 days and was plagued by bizarre publicity. The couple married at the Palace of Westminster and honeymooned at Disneyland Paris (France) where Miss Louise claimed that she slept on the sofa and later in the bath. The marriage was swiftly annulled.
Taylor was charged with six counts of False Accounting during the recent MP’s Expenses Scandal in July 2010. He was found guilty by a majority vote and faces being stripped of his peerage as well as up to four years in prison. He gave up his seat in the House of Lords. Taylor claimed travel expenses for a home in Oxford that he had never visited and a second home in West London at his own address. In his defense, he claimed that he was acting in good faith and had been advised by friends and colleagues that claiming such expenses was common practice among MPs.