Stonehouse

I've just finished watching Stonehouse, a drama documentary based on the former Labour MP for Walsall North which interestingly is the constituency I live in, although I was not living in the Midlands at the time this all happened.

The film depicts him as a complete idiot, although I'm not convinced he was as stupid as the writers made out. The story (as portrayed in the film) asserts that he was created a junior minister in the aviation ministry and, as part of his role, was sent to Czechoslovakia, where he was supposedly compromised by the Czech secret service and blackmailed into being a spy. I think this was presented to lay the foundation for his money troubles, ultimately, his downfall. In the film, we see him being paid vast sums of money for effectively little or rubbish information by his so-called Czech paymasters, which is funny if you think about it, a communist country trapping an MP from a Socialist government and then trying to illicit state secrets from a country whose government is supposedly in tune with their own political aspirations.

Anyway, so the stage was set that John Stonehouse was suddenly flush with money, buying a new house and car and starting an affair with his then secretary. When Labour lost the General Election in 1970, he was not given a job in the shadow government, and so started his financial troubles. He started doing dodgy stuff with his businesses and committed false accounting; aware that the authorities were looking into these anomalies, he famously faked his own death in Miami and went on the run ending up in Australia. According to the film, he was reported to the police by a member of the public who mistakenly thought he was Lord Lucan who had murdered his children's nanny and gone missing at the same time. Once it was discovered who he was, the UK successfully applied for his extradition back to stand trial, where he was found guilty and given seven years.

The main part of his defence was that he had undergone a breakdown, and to be honest, I wondered if, in fact, he may well have done. Looking at both the film and what you can find on the Internet, there seem to be only two conclusions. Either he did have a breakdown, or he was a complete and utter moron!

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