John Stonehouse

John Thomson Stonehouse was born on 28 July 1925 in Southampton, His father was local secretary of his trade union; Stonehouse joined the Labour Party at the age of sixteen. His mother, a former scullery maid, was the sixth female mayor of Southampton and a councillor on Southampton City Council from 1936 to 1970. Stonehouse was educated at Taunton's School (now Richard Taunton Sixth Form College), Southampton, and served as a Royal Air Force pilot from 1944 until 1946. He then attended the London School of Economics (LSE), where he read for a BSc (Econ.) degree. and the Labour society. The political scientist Bernard Crick, who was a contemporary of Stonehouse at university, recalls that his then nickname was 'Lord John', and that "his conversation was openly and restlessly about how best to get a parliamentary seat." ==Political career==

Stonehouse stood unsuccessfully in Norwood at the 1949 London County Council election. He was first elected as the Labour Co-operative Member of Parliament (MP) for Wednesbury in Staffordshire in a 1957 by-election, having contested Twickenham in 1950 and Burton in 1951. In February 1959, Stonehouse travelled to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland on a fact-finding tour in which he condemned the white minority government of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Speaking to the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress, he encouraged indigenous Rhodesians to stand up for their rights and said they had the support of the British Labour Party. Stonehouse was promptly deported from Southern Rhodesia and banned from returning a year later. Stonehouse served as a junior minister of aviation, where he was involved in the British Overseas Airways Corporation's order of Boeing 707 aircraft from the United States, against his own recommendation that they should buy the Super Vickers VC10, a British-made aircraft. This led to accusations by Stonehouse against colleagues about the reasons for the decision. In March 1968, Stonehouse negotiated an agreement providing a framework for the long-term development of technological co-operation between Britain and Czechoslovakia providing for the exchange of specialists and information, facilities for study and research in technology, and such other forms of industrial co-operation which might be agreed. Stonehouse's rise continued while in the Colonial Office, and in 1967 he became Minister for Technology under Wilson. He later served as Postmaster General, where his greatest contribution to the postal system was the introduction of first and second-class postage in 1968, often called the two-tier post, which was met with a full day of debate on the floor of Parliament after a bungled marketing campaign. The debates over Stonehouse's leadership were followed shortly after by the abolition of the office of Postmaster General by the Post Office Act 1969. As Minister of Posts and Telecommunications in 1970, Stonehouse oversaw the controversial jamming of the offshore radio station Radio North Sea International. When Labour was defeated at the 1970 general election, he was not appointed to the Shadow Cabinet. When the Wednesbury constituency was abolished in 1974, Stonehouse stood for and was elected to the nearby Walsall North constituency in the February general election. With Labour a minority government, another election was called in September, and Stonehouse was re-elected with an increased majority of nearly 16,000 in the October election, just six weeks before his disappearance. Stonehouse's last Parliamentary contribution before his disappearance was at Prime Minister's Questions on 14 November 1974, a few days before leaving for Miami, Florida. ==Spy allegations==

Stonehouse allegedly began spying for Czechoslovakia in 1962. In a meeting with Harold Wilson in 1969, Stonehouse was informed of assertions that he was a Czechoslovak secret service agent; the informant was a defector from the Czechoslovak secret service, who had been debriefed by the US security services. At that time, Stonehouse successfully defended himself. In 2009, the spy allegation was substantiated in the official history of MI5, The Defence of the Realm (2009) by Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew. In December 2010, it was revealed that Margaret Thatcher had agreed to cover up revelations that Stonehouse had been a Czechoslovak spy in 1980, as there was insufficient evidence to bring him to trial. Until the 2012 exposure of Ray Mawby, briefly a member of a Conservative government, Stonehouse was the only Minister known to have been an agent for the former Eastern bloc. ==Business interests==

Having lost his ministerial salary in 1970, Stonehouse set up various companies in an attempt to supplement his salary as an MP. By 1974 most of these companies were facing financial trouble, and Stonehouse had resorted to deceptive creative accounting. Aware that the Department of Trade and Industry was looking at his affairs, Stonehouse decided that his best choice would be to flee the country. Secret government documents, declassified in 2005, indicate that Stonehouse spent months rehearsing his new identity as 'Joseph Markham', the deceased husband of a constituent. == Disappearance ==

Stonehouse maintained the pretence of normality until he faked his death on 20 November 1974, leaving a pile of clothes on a beach in Miami to make it appear that he had suffered a fatal misadventure while swimming. Arrest and aftermath Stonehouse was arrested in Melbourne on 24 December 1974. He applied for the position of Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds while still in Australia (one of the ways for an MP to resign), but decided not to sign the papers. On 17 July 1975, Stonehouse was extradited to the UK, escorted by Scotland Yard officers. He was remanded in Brixton Prison until August 1975 when he was released on bail. Stonehouse continued to serve as an MP; on 20 October 1975 he made a personal statement to the House of Commons, stating his reasons for his disappearance, his first Parliamentary oration since his disappearance almost a year earlier: Although unhappy with the situation, the Labour Party did not expel Stonehouse as their parliamentary majority was very narrow. On 4 April 1976 Stonehouse attended a St George's Day festival hosted by the English National Party; he later confirmed he had joined the party, making Labour a minority government. Stonehouse conducted his own defence on twenty-one charges of fraud, theft, forgery, conspiracy to defraud, causing a false police investigation and wasting police time. His trial lasted 68 days. On 6 August 1976, Stonehouse was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison for fraud, and received a criminal bankruptcy order. becoming one of only three people to resign from the Privy Council in the 20th century. Stonehouse tendered his resignation via the Chiltern Hundreds route from the House of Commons on 27 August 1976. The subsequent by-election was won by Robin Hodgson, a Conservative. In October 1976, Stonehouse was declared bankrupt. Stonehouse was imprisoned in HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs. On 30 June 1977, the House of Lords refused his appeal against five of the charges of which he was convicted. While he was in prison, Stonehouse complained that the prison workshop where he worked played a pop music radio station. He made acquaintance with Moors murderer Ian Brady, and the pair played chess together until Brady was transferred elsewhere. When his health deteriorated, Stonehouse was moved to HM Prison Blundeston in Suffolk. ==Health problems==

On 14 August 1979, Stonehouse was released early because of good behaviour and because he had suffered three heart attacks; he had the first on 18 April 1977, a second one four days later, and a massive heart attack on 13 August 1978. On 6 September 1978, Stonehouse suffered a coronary ischemia attack which required him to spend three days in hospital. He underwent open heart surgery on 7 November 1978 which lasted for six hours. ==After release==

'' in 1987 From January 1980, Stonehouse was a volunteer fundraiser for the East London-based charity, Community Links. He joined the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which later amalgamated with the Liberal Party to become the Liberal Democrats. In June 1980, he was discharged from bankruptcy. Stonehouse wrote four novels and made numerous television and radio appearances during the rest of his life, mostly in connection with discussing his disappearance. In June 1986 he appeared on TVS's Regrets programme and in December that year on the BBC Radio 4 interview programme ''In The Psychiatrist's Chair'' with Anthony Clare. ==Personal life==

Stonehouse married Barbara Joan Smith in 1948; the marriage produced three children. After their divorce in 1978, Stonehouse married his mistress, Sheila Elizabeth Buckley (née Black), in Hampshire on 31 January 1981; the marriage produced one child. Stonehouse's daughter Julia published an account of her father's life in 2021 entitled John Stonehouse, My Father: The True Story of the Runaway MP; it was released almost simultaneously with a book called Stonehouse: Cabinet Minister, Fraudster, Spy, by criminal defence solicitor Julian Hayes, who is Stonehouse's great-nephew through the author's father, Michael Hayes, who was the MP's nephew and his lawyer. Julia has an eponymous website in which she questions the veracity of other books and broadcasts about her father. ==Death==

On 25 March 1988, Stonehouse collapsed on set during an edition of Central Weekend in Birmingham during the filming of a programme about missing people. He was given emergency medical treatment at the studio and an ambulance was called. He was diagnosed as having suffered a minor heart attack and kept in the city's general hospital overnight. Just under three weeks later, early on 14 April, he suffered a massive heart attack at his house at Dales Way in Totton, Hampshire, where he had moved six months earlier, having lived in London since his release from prison, his last address there having been at 20 Shirland Mews. This time Stonehouse could not be saved and he died in hospital at 2:30am, aged 62. Stonehouse was cremated in Bassett Green, Southampton, on 22 April 1988. The former MP Bruce Douglas-Mann paid tribute. In 1989, his fourth novel was published posthumously. ==Television series==

The British ITV series Stonehouse, a dramatisation of Stonehouse's story, was first broadcast from 2 to 4 January 2023. The series starred Matthew Macfadyen and Keeley Hawes and was directed by Jon S. Baird from a script by John Preston. ==Books by John Stonehouse==

Non-fiction • Prohibited Immigrant (Bodley Head, 1960)Stonehouse's account of his 1959 African tour, which culminated in his deportation from Southern Rhodesia. • Death of an Idealist (W. H. Allen, 1975) • My Trial (Wyndham, 1976) Fiction • Ralph (Jonathan Cape, 1982) • The Baring Fault (Calder, 1986) • Oil on the Rift (Robert Hale, 1987) • Who Sold Australia? (Robert Hale, 1989) == See also ==