Little can John Stonehouse have imagined as he left his neat bundle of clothes in a locker near a Miami beach and embarked on a remarkable disappearing act in 1974 that nearly half a century later he would become the subject of a three-part television series, two documentaries and a trio of combative books that have pitted members of his family against each other.
The three-part series, Stonehouse, stars Matthew Macfadyen, fresh from his triumph in Succession, in the eponymous role and his wife, Keeley Hawes, playing Barbara, the politician’s then wife. It is written by John Preston, author of A Very English Scandal, the book about disgraced Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe on which the 2018 television drama was based. The off-screen drama is the question of whether Stonehouse was a spy and fraudster or a well-intentioned anti-colonial campaigner who lost his reason through too many prescription drugs.
Stonehouse was the Labour MP for Wednesbury and Walsall North, who had been involved in anti-apartheid and Bangladesh independence campaigns and was a member of Harold Wilson’s cabinet as aviation minister and postmaster general, but his career was fatally damaged when he was named in 1969 by a Czech secret service defector, Josef Frolík, as one of their agents. He was also soon in deep financial trouble through unwise involvement in banking companies and was having an affair with his much younger secretary, Sheila Buckley. He decided to create a new identity for himself and start a new life in Australia.
Taking a leaf from Freddie Forsyth’s book, The Day of the Jackal, he realised it was possible to steal the identity of someone who had died early and who would have been around the same age as the would-be vanisher. As an MP he was able to get the names of men in their forties who had died recently in his constituency and he duly tracked down Jean Markham, the widow of Joseph Markham and Elsie Mildoon, the widow of Donald Clive Mildoon, the two men whose identities he would use for his new life. Then came the trip to Miami Beach, with the bogus passports, the abandoned clothes and the plunge into the sea followed by a swift unobserved exit.
Initially, it was believed that he had really drowned but after surfacing in Australia, bank staff in Melbourne became suspicious of this strange Englishman who appeared to have two identities. Stonehouse was arrested. There was a hunt on at the time for another missing Englishman, Lord Lucan, who had fled after murdering his children’s nanny, Sandra Rivett. Stonehouse was duly asked by the police to pull his trouser leg up because Lucan had a scar on his leg.
The arrest led to his eventual deportation to England and a 1976 Old Bailey trial for fraud, theft and deception after which he was convicted and jailed. Originally represented by barristers Richard du Cann and Geoffrey Robertson, he decided to defend himself. In his memoir, Rather His Own Man, Robertson recalls: “I had told him that he might receive three years if he pleaded guilty and showed some contrition, or five years if convicted after Dick and I had fought every point, but, if he defended himself and got up the nose of the judge, he might get seven. He got seven.”
He served three years and married Buckley, with whom he had another son. He quit the Labour party, in which he had become a pariah, and joined the English National party – not the far-right outfit but an eccentric now defunct group into Morris dancing and the idea of an English parliament – and then joined the SDP. He died of a heart attack in 1988 at the age 62.
He told his side of the story in his book Death of an Idealist and hoped to follow the lead of another disgraced MP, Jeffrey Archer, by writing bestselling novels. In one, Ralph, there is a “honey-trap” episode with a politician being recruited as a Soviet spy and which has led some of his biographers – and the television series – to suggest that this may have actually happened to him, although there is no evidence that it ever did.
Preston was originally planning a biography of Stonehouse – he is also the author of Fall, the biography of Robert Maxwell which won the Costa biography award in 2021 – but decided instead on a drama series. He says he was attracted to a story – similar to that of Thorpe’s – of how people behave when “circumstances bend them out of shape”. He was also interested in “that persistent fantasy, entertained mainly by men” of vanishing. As to whether he was a spy, “I don’t think Stonehouse gave the Czech authorities any vital piece of information … The worst thing he did was to let his wife and children think that he was dead.”
Stonehouse’s daughter, Julia, who is herself a non-fiction author and ghost writer, was meanwhile in the process of writing her own book, John Stonehouse My Father, which came out last year.
“My mother is now 91 and we had avoided doing a book,” Julia Stonehouse says. “We all hoped it would kind of go away.”
She said she and her mother would watch the drama but knew it was full of events that didn’t happen. She rejects suggestions that her father was a spy and her website goes into great detail to rebut the allegations.
“Certainly he met with persons at the Czech embassy as he twinned his constituency of Wednesbury with the Czech town of Kladno, and tried to sell them VC-10 commercial planes in his capacity as a minister – but that did not make him a spy,” she wrote. His accuser, Josef Frolík, who was reported to have died of cancer in the United States in 1989, never actually met Stonehouse and has been widely discredited. Julia believes that the money supposedly given to Stonehouse went into the pockets of the agents. But she accepts that her father acted wrongly in changing his identity.
“Throughout everything that’s happened with my family, over all the years, this is the one thing we find so terrible,” she wrote. “On behalf of my father, I apologise to the Markham and Mildoon families and hope they can accept that this bizarre behaviour was only brought about by the terrible stress and the effects of mind-twisting prescription drugs. It’s unbelievable to us, the family, that my father should do something as cold-hearted as having a conversation with two widows with a view to adopting their husbands’ names.”
Her father, she suggests, was addicted to Mandrax and Mogadon, which led to his bizarre behaviour. “Whenever he saw an MP who was also a GP walking down the corridor of the House of Commons, he’d get a prescription from him.” This led, she suggests to the depression, paranoia and mental confusion that led to his behaviour.
In the meantime, Julian Hayes, a lawyer whose father, Michael, was Stonehouse’s nephew and business partner, was working on his book, Stonehouse: Cabinet Minister, Fraudster, Spy, also published last year. It recounts how Michael Hayes, at the time a young lawyer, was “wounded that his uncle, a figure he so admired, could act so callously and irresponsibly” in surreptitiously removing large amounts of money from the company’s bank accounts. He gave evidence against him in the Old Bailey trial. Julian Hayes concludes: “Stonehouse was not a spy or agent in terms that we understand them in the novels of John le Carré and Ian Fleming. He hadn’t provided them with anything significant and the disappointment in their filed reports is palpable.”
A third book, Agent Twister, which was the code name the Czechs gave him, by Philip Augar and Keely Winstone, was published this year. Winstone also directed the Channel 4 documentary, The Spy Who Died Twice, broadcast in the summer. They conclude their book by asking: “Was Stonehouse a spy? It is hard to think of any other term to describe a senior politician who secretly accepted money from an adversarial foreign power in return for information.” They also ask: “Was Stonehouse a white-collar criminal? Undoubtedly.”
Stonehouse not only generated a thousand other headlines – the Daily Mail asked “Was Stonehouse working for the CIA” while the Sunday Times wondered “Did Mafia cut in on Stonehouse’s £6.5 million deal?” – but entered the culture in other ways. Billy Connolly wrote a song which went “John Stonehouse went swimming/ When his bank was a failure/ He went in at Miami/ And swam to Australia.” And many believed that his disappearance was the inspiration for The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, the 1970s television sitcom, starring Leonard Rossiter, which also contains a faked seaside departure. It was, in fact, based on a novel by David Nobbs that had been written before the MP’s disappearance.
The new TV series, which inevitably starts on that beach in Florida, opens with a caveat that it is “based on a true story. Some scenes and characters have been imagined for dramatic purposes”. The latest episodes of The Crown have been a reminder of the thin line between fact and fiction when “based on a true story”.
Anyone seeking the whole truth might be advised to read the books and the website to appreciate what a very tangled web the man, who once imagined he might have been prime minister, left beneath his neat little bundle of clothes.
Stonehouse is on ITV on 2, 3 and 4 January at 9pm. The Real Stonehouse documentary is on ITV on 5 January.
