If you don't know the story of John Stonehouse — the British politician who faked his own death, deserting his wife and children to start a new life in Australia with his mistress, away from his fraudulent financial woes — chances are you will soon.
Intense interest has been building about the British Labour MP, once touted as a potential future prime minister, whose outrageous behaviour led to his arrest in Melbourne on Christmas Eve in 1974 and an Old Bailey trial yet, bizarrely, he continued on as an MP.
Stonehouse's eventual resignation, from a British prison in 1976, caused prime minister James Callaghan's Labour government to lose its knife-edge majority, forcing them into a coalition with the Liberal Party.
