Stonehouse affair stranger than fiction

The story of a British Labour MP who faked his own death only to be found living at Melbourne’s Flinders Street station shows the truth has a funny way of catching up.

Matthew Macfadyen as John Stonehouse.

John Stonehouse MP thought he’d done a pretty thorough job of killing himself; or, more precisely, killing off any idea he might still be alive. On the evening of November 20, 1974, when his clothes and passport were found in plain view on a Miami beach, authorities in Britain and the US reckoned the member for Walsall North had pulled a Harold Holt and was, by then, sleeping with the fish somewhere off the Atlantic Coast.

His early obituarists noted the loss of a talented political career on the rise, while suggesting Her Majesty’s former postmaster general had met a grubby end, possibly at the hands of local mafia or by way of a shark, marauding offshore. But even in death Stonehouse proved an elusive figure, for some 16,000km away, at the other end of the world, he was already busy arranging a new life for himself in Melbourne.

Weeks before, the respected Labour politician had attempted to forestall financial ruin by travelling to the US to fake his own death. By then, wild rumours had already been circulating of his alleged links to foreign agents in Czechoslovakia, and of a long-term affair with his secretary in London.

When Australian police found the runaway MP, dressed in a Savile Row suit, lodging in a squalid little flat off Flinders St Station, they initially mistook him for Lord Lucan – the British aristocrat and peer who had vanished after murdering his family’s nanny. But none could’ve predicted his absurd vanishing act, beginning with the identity theft of a recently deceased constituent, and ending in disgrace, as a defeated middle-aged man, cowering in the dock at the Old Bailey.

Condemned and pilloried by the popular press as a defector, swindler and adulterer, Stonehouse spent three years behind bars before succumbing to heart complications at 62, less than a decade after his release.

Almost 50 years later, the Stonehouse affair remains the perfect parable of the politically bizarre and personally scandalous. That an ostensibly prosaic politician should be brought down by financial fraud and spy allegations was drama enough; that he should go on to renounce his family, fake his own death and move to the other side of the world, opened up an entirely new arena of the absurd.

The affair was certainly a major story in its time, and caused no end of problems for Harold Wilson’s struggling Labour government, which briefly entertained the idea of reinstating the wayward MP to keep its slender majority. But the Stonehouse saga has undergone something of a revival in recent years. And in a new three-part series, starring two-time BAFTA-award winner Matthew Macfadyen, the tragicomic dimensions of his descent into madness are given the full treatment, in a hilarious, piercing and occasionally unforgiving portrait of his life and misadventures.

In an interview with Review, Macfadyen and director Jon Baird agree the Stonehouse affair could not have been done as a “straight narrative” or neatly packaged into any one genre, such was the quicksilver nature of their subject.

A scene from Stonehouse.

“This is such a bizarre and weird tale. It had to be funny because it is just so utterly bonkers, if you tried to do this straight, I don’t know how the hell you would tell it,” Baird tells Review.

“Of course, it’s reality being stranger than fiction, but the story also brings together huge elements of comedy and tragedy. It had a great script from the beginning, and that doesn’t happen like that a lot of the time.”

For Macfadyen, who seems to have all but mastered the embattled and buffoonish middle-aged male on screen (most notably as the beleaguered Tom Wambsgans in Succession), Stonehouse was a wellspring of possibilities. “When we started rehearsing the scenes, we were laughing most of the time because it’s just so ludicrous, his pomposity and vanity was limitless,” says Macfadyen.

“During the scenes when he’s in hiding in Australia, we were killing ourselves with laughter because he looks like a sort of demented Les Patterson. And then there was the joy of playing a character, in those ridiculous circumstances, and counteracting it with this life-and-death situation. For me, I found it was much easier to be quite broad and then find moments of sadness or poignancy within him, rather than the other way round.”

The beginning of the end for Stonehouse comes in the opening minutes of the miniseries, inside a smoke-filled interrogation room, just after he’s enlisted as an “unofficial representative” for Czechoslovakia at the highest levels of British government. The night before, the then-aviation minister had landed face-first into a perfectly devised Soviet honey-trap, and after the tryst was captured on camera and presented to Stonehouse the following morning, he had little choice. And so, his days as a secret agent had begun, with the Czech secret police assigning him the apparently unironic alias, Agent Twister.

Fortunately for Her Majesty’s government, Agent Twister turned out to be a thoroughly hopeless spymaster, with his Czech superiors surprisingly uninterested in the latest developments in Britain’s two-tier postal system or a mysterious fire at a petrol station near Bristol. In fact, any attempt to supply his foreign masters with worthy intel is invariably shambolic.

“One of the most important things about being a spy is that you have to get information before everyone else − not after,” an exasperated agent tells Stonehouse, after he conveys “top secret” information which had appeared on a TV broadcast two days before. In this, and in other moments of farce, Stonehouse’s remarkable blend of mediocrity and narcissism is occasionally forgotten – suspended behind a smokescreen of goofy Wodehousian exuberance – until the next gaffe rolls around, and you’re reminded what an unprincipled bastard he truly is. “I think from that point on Stonehouse felt like he would be exposed as a spy at any moment,” says Macfadyen. “He was really staring down the barrel of terrible shame and ignominy, so that’s why he decided to fake his own death, to do something that was so drastic, disruptive and damaging.

“He left his three children and wife and the whole apparatus of life. It’s such a big deal for a man to do that, to turn his back and walk away.”

And yet almost nothing of Stonehouse’s early life and career hinted at the devastation he would later inflict upon himself and virtually everyone who fell within his orbit. He embodied all things Labour: a card-carrying party member since boyhood, trade unionist parents, a serviceman in the RAF during the war and a stable nuclear family at home. Even his name, with its solid Middle English roots and demotic sense of place and pedigree, evinced a certain air of self-assurance and conventionality.

“He seemed like a fairly standard Labour politician at home,” says Macfadyen. “But I think it got to a point where he was simply unable to get off. He was unable to stop. He didn’t have that little voice to go ‘hold on, what am I doing here?’… He had no self-awareness whatsoever and that’s, I think, a trait of many politicians. Sometimes they don’t have the ability to say, ‘hang on, I may have made a mistake here and I need to backtrack’.

“He was under incredible strain and pressure, but nearly all of that was self-inflicted. He was in terrible financial straits, and he’d really set up a sort of house of cards for himself.”

Still, the motivations that propelled Stonehouse into that strange, self-lacerating world of fake deaths, espionage and identity theft remain fiercely contested, especially among his closest relatives, who will doubtless take issue with many aspects of the Stonehouse miniseries. Only two years ago, Stonehouse’s second daughter, Julia, wrote a book defending her father against claims he was a Czech spymaster. She maintained her father, though not entirely balanced in mind, was not such a bad man, merely misunderstood. His actions, moreover, were the result of a mental breakdown and an addiction to mood-altering prescription drugs. The book hit the shelves shortly after her cousin’s own account, Stonehouse: Cabinet Minister, Fraudster, Spy, in which he argued there was sufficient documentary evidence proving his uncle took money from the Czech secret service in exchange for classified information.

“We were well aware of the dispute when we embarked on this,” Baird tells Review. “Part of his family disputes some of the spy aspects, and others are very much of the opinion he was unquestionably spying for the Czechs. But I think it’s been proven beyond reasonable doubt.”

Asked whether the miniseries had been fair in its portrayal of the affair, Baird and Macfadyen maintain they have been more than reasonable in their representation of Stonehouse.

“The things that John Stonehouse did to get himself in that situation, and the way we’ve portrayed him, has been incredibly fair,” says Baird. “When you come out of the series you have a lot of empathy for the man, regardless of what he chose to do.

“I think when people watch the three episodes together, they will walk away believing Stonehouse was a bizarre character, but he was a human being. There was a version of this story that you could have told which really vilified him a hell of a lot more than we have done. It is a dark comedy and … the tone of it helps his legacy.”

Stonehouse is streaming on BritBox.