Photograph: Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty Images
When John Stonehouse, a stylish cabinet minister in Harold Wilson’s Labour government, piled up his clothes on a beach in Miami in 1974 and disappeared, he left many unsolved questions behind him.
Even today, almost 50 years after he was discovered to have faked his own death to try to start a new life in Australia, the facts of his story remain in question. Was he mentally ill? Was he a traitor? Did he act alone?