Stonehouse’s daughter hits dead end over truth about runaway MP
WHEN rogue MP John Stonehouse faked his own death, he was hoping to wipe all trace of his existence. Now, nearly 50 years after the extraordinary attempt, for which he was sentenced to seven years in prison, it seems he’s finally succeeded.
I can reveal that his daughter, Julia, has lost an agonising legal battle to see official papers about him — leading her to declare that it’s as if ‘he never existed’.
The Labour MP, who was a cabinet minister under Harold Wilson, faked his death in 1974 by disappearing after leaving a pile of clothes on a beach in Miami. But he was later found in Australia (police suspected him of being runaway peer Lord Lucan), where he had planned to set up a new life with his mistress, his secretary Sheila Buckley.
Stonehouse was extradited to Britain where he was jailed for fraud in 1976, and died from a heart attack in 1988, aged 62.
Julia, who has just published an account of her father’s life, John Stonehouse, My Father, had applied to the Attorney General for correspondence concerning him and the
Crown Prosecution Service between 1975 and 1977. She asked for information about his extradition, committal proceedings and correspondence before and during his Old Bailey trial, and his appeal.
But she was astonished when, in 2019, the Attorney General’s Office told her they had searched for the name Stonehouse and found nothing, before a review found one file.
She complained that it was ‘inconceivable’ that there was no paperwork about Stonehouse, and argued they had not looked hard enough.
‘Despite all these efforts over a very long period of time, I have not managed to extract a single piece of paper from any public agency relating to my father,’ she says. ‘If I did not know better, I’d think he never existed.’
Tribunal Judge Chris Hughes compared the search ordeal to a play by Sir Tom Stoppard.
‘In Stoppard’s Hapgood, the protagonist helps her son find what he has lost by thinking through all the places he has been. In this case, the starting point is that old files of government departments, if they exist, are retained in the National Archive.’
But Ms Stonehouse has found no relevant files in the National Archive, which confirms no such record existed, he ruled.