Ian Winterbottom, Baron Winterbottom

Ian Winterbottom, Baron Winterbottom (6 April 1913 – 4 July 1992) was a Labour Party politician in the United Kingdom. He was a junior minister in the Labour Governments of the 1960s and 1970s who later defected to the Social Democratic Party.

Life Winterbottom was born in Horton House, Northamptonshire, the fifth child of the wealthy industrialist G. H. Winterbottom. He was educated at Charterhouse School and Clare College, Cambridge, where he studied natural sciences. Upon coming down from university he was employed in his father's bookcloth firm until the advent of the Second World War, when he established a machine tools factory in Derby and then volunteered for the army. He served in the Royal Horse Guards for four years, reaching the rank of captain and taking part in fighting across much of north-western Europe. In 1946, he was demobilised and shortly afterwards became the aide-de-camp and personal assistant to Vaughan Berry, the regional commissioner of Hamburg in the British occupation zone.

Winterbottom had been drawn to socialism while working in one of his father's textile mills in Manchester, and became a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in Miles Platting towards the end of the 1930s. After Labour's victory at the 1966 general election, he joined the Labour Government, serving as Under-Secretary of State for the Navy until 1967, as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Public Building and Works from 1967 to 1968 and finally as Under-Secretary of State for the Air Force from 1968 until the government's defeat at the 1970 general election.

After Labour was returned to office in 1974 Winterbottom became a Lord-in-Waiting (whip) and spokesman on defence and trade in the House of Lords, but as a moderate in the party he was disappointed by the Government's record and resigned from it in 1978. In his Who's Who entry he described himself as "latterly a Conservative", and after a brief period on the crossbenches he took the Conservative whip in the Lords shortly before his death in 1992 at the age of 79.