Last week, No 10 issued a statement regarding what it considered to be “very concerning” reports of MPs indulging in sex and excessive alcohol while on parliamentary trips abroad. (Perhaps the suitcase full of wine served a purpose beyond Downing Street?) With fortuitous timing, Stonehouse (ITV 1) is here with the vintage edition. This fun and funny drama, high-spirited and revelling in its absurdities, retells the story of John Stonehouse, Labour MP for Walsall North, a former postmaster general and rising star of Harold Wilson’s government, who got himself in a spot of financial and espionage-based bother. His solution was to fake his own death on a beach in Miami in 1974, before fleeing to Australia with his secretary and assuming a new, stolen identity.
The problem for him, and the joy for viewers, is that Stonehouse is not very good at being a baddie. Matthew Macfadyen plays him as a heedless buffoon from the start. In the Commons, he parrots what Wilson says; at home, he parrots what his wife, Barbara (played by Macfadyen’s real-life wife, Keeley Hawes), says. He is a man in search of an identity, and on a work trip to Czechoslovakia (as it was then), he makes much use of the “traditional Czech specialities” on offer by getting extremely drunk and having sex with his guide and translator – an act which is, naturally, filmed by the Czech secret service and used to blackmail him into spying for them.
Stonehouse, a family man in an ordinary house, does not seem particularly perturbed by this development. He sees it as a chance to inject a bit of excitement into his suburban life. The trouble is, he is not very good at spying either. His information is either boring – and the on-screen Stonehouse is talented at boring for England, if nothing else – or delightedly delivers outdated information. “You are the worst spy I have ever come across. Ever!” barks his handler, who wanted state secrets and got a dreary Bond acolyte instead.
He is so bad at delivering useful information that you start to wonder if it is a strategy. One of the case studies in Stephen Grosz’s fascinating book about psychoanalysis, The Examined Life, is of a man who seems set on boring everyone around him; Grosz concludes that it is a deliberate act, designed to exclude others. I wonder if that might be what Stonehouse is up to, but perhaps that is reading too deeply into the story. Besides, the evidence for it turns out not to be particularly strong; Stonehouse gleefully informs the Czechs of the invention of Concorde, only to be told that this bombshell had been on French television news, two nights earlier.
The tone is spot-on, tongue-in-cheek and cheeky. It is written by John Preston, who also wrote the book on which 2018’s A Very English Scandal, about disgraced MP Jeremy Thorpe, was based, and it canters along at a similar pace. Much of the scandalousness is played for comic effect. The title sequence is Mad Men-ish, the soundtrack Pink Panther-esque, and the espionage is campy rather than sinister. Macfadyen’s Stonehouse has a touch of his Succession character, Tom Wambsgans, though the MP lacks the watery cruelness of Wambsgans; Stonehouse is less devious and easier to please.
But there are cruelties here, casually buried within its slapstick, as you might expect from a man who attempts to convince the world he is dead. Poor Barbara tries to intervene in the household budget, as newer cars and bigger houses turn up on the scene while private school fees go unpaid. “Which one of us is a graduate of the London School of Economics?” her husband says, pretending there is nothing to worry about. He hires a secretary whose shorthand is lacking, mostly because he fancies her. And later, he steals the identity of a dead constituent, flattering his widow by attending the man’s funeral, only to betray him for his own dreadful purposes.
Last July, Stonehouse’s daughter expressed concerns that the drama would be a “misrepresentation” of her father’s story. As with most of these types of drama, it gets a disclaimer at the beginning, explaining that it is “based on a true story” with some parts “reimagined” for dramatic purposes. It seems inevitable that there would be complaints by surviving relatives, as it is not particularly sympathetic to Stonehouse. From The Crown to The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe, the question of what a drama inspired by real life owes to its subjects, if it owes anything at all, will continue to be the subject of debate. As a drama, though, the brief rise and astonishing fall of Stonehouse, John Stonehouse, makes for enormously entertaining television.
