The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Why Daddy faked his death (twice)
Can a disgraced MP’s relatives save his reputation?
JOHN STONEHOUSE, MY FATHER by Julia Stonehouse
416pp, Icon, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £12.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
STONEHOUSE: CABINET MINISTER, FRAUDSTER, SPY by Julian Hayes
384pp, Robinson, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £12.99
How odd that John Stonehouse, the errant Labour MP who faked his own death in 1974, now suddenly gets two biographies simultaneously, one by his daughter, Julia Stonehouse, the other by his great-nephew Julian Hayes.
Stonehouse actually faked his death twice. At the time, he was supposedly a respected MP, former Cabinet minister and Privy Counsellor, fond husband to Barbara and father of three children. But he was also deep in financial difficulties of his own making (shuffling money between his numerous companies, robbing Peter to pay Paul) and worried that he might soon be exposed as a former Czech spy. He also had a long-standing mistress, his secretary Sheila Buckley, who may or may not have known what he was up to. So he decided to fake his own death, and start a new life with Sheila in Australia.
He made detailed preparations. He learned from Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal how to obtain a fake passport – first, get a duplicate birth certificate of someone who had recently died, then apply in their name. He found two candidates in his constituency, Clive Mildoon and Joseph Markham, visited their widows, and extracted enough information to apply for duplicate birth certificates. He used one identity, Markham, to get a fake passport, and he used both identities to set up fake bank accounts and start siphoning money into them from his own companies. He also took out life insurance policies which would supposedly provide for his wife Barbara and children once he had gone – except that he must have known they would not pay out for seven years unless there was a body.
He then flew to Miami, went through immigration as John Stonehouse, then joined another queue and went through as Joseph Markham. He booked into the Fontainebleau hotel and said he was going for a swim. He left his clothes on the beach and his Stonehouse passport and papers in his room. But first he popped round to a deserted hotel next door and left his Markham passport, money and another set of clothes in a phone booth. He then swam out to sea – he was a strong swimmer – and along to the next-door hotel where he changed into fresh clothes and took a taxi to the airport. All went smoothly – except that no one noticed he was missing. He spent two days flying hither and thither, waiting for the balloon to go up. But it never did, and eventually he went back to the Fontainebleau, picked up his clothes from the beach and his Stonehouse papers from his room and flew home to England.
He resolved to try it again but next time with a witness – someone who would report him missing. So he arranged to meet a friend at the Fontainebleau for dinner at 7.30 but said that first he was going for a swim. When he didn’t show up, the friend found his clothes on the beach, checked his room, and then reported his absence to the police. By this time Stonehouse was on his way to Australia, as Markham. He rented a flat in Melbourne, hoping that Sheila would soon join him. By this time the British press was running front pages about his disappearance, and also investigating his financial affairs.
Stonehouse worried that the Markham name might be getting hot and decided to switch to his other alias, Mildoon. But he made one big mistake. He took $22,000 out of his Markham account and walked a few yards down the street to another bank to set up a new account as Mildoon. It didn’t occur
John Stonehouse learned from The Day of the Jackal how to obtain a fake passport
to him that tellers at the two banks often met for lunch. One said he’d had a strange morning because a tall Englishman had come into his bank and taken out $22,000 and the other said that’s funny because a tall Englishman had come into his bank and deposited $22,000. The tellers told the bank managers, who told the police. So within two days of arriving in Melbourne he was under surveillance. The police realised he was up to something but they couldn’t work out what – at one point they wondered if he was Lord Lucan. They asked Interpol for photographs of missing Englishmen and were rewarded with a photograph of John Stonehouse.
So they arrested him but then discovered he hadn’t actually committed a crime. True, he had entered Australia on a false passport but, as a British MP, he didn’t need any entry document. So the police let him go and he carried on life in Melbourne, joining the chess club and jazz club, but now constantly harried by the British press. Barbara flew out to join him for a few days, courtesy of the Daily Express, then she flew home and Sheila came out. Meanwhile the Department of Trade and Industry in London was investigating his financial affairs and realising it could charge him with fraud. The legal ramifications were enormous but he was finally extradited and tried at the Old Bailey in 1976. He infuriated the judge by sacking his counsel and conducting his own defence, which meant the trial dragged on much longer than necessary – his eventual sentence was seven years and he got out after three. Barbara divorced him, he married Sheila, had a son, wrote three novels and died of a heart attack in 1988, aged 62.
Julia writes with a daughter’s besotted loyalty, which might be engaging were she not so fearlessly prolix. She is obsessed with pointing out every mistake the press ever made, though none of it bears on her father’s guilt. She believes that he only staged his disappearance because he was suffering a severe mental breakdown brought on by the influence of “mind-twisting prescribed drugs” – Mandrax and Mogadon – which he took for insomnia. But even she has to admit that it was “cold-hearted” of him to visit the Markham and Mildoon widows in order to steal their husbands’ identities. As Geoffrey Robertson, Stonehouse’s one-time barrister, pointed out: “If it was madness, there was too much method in it ever to convince the jury.” Hayes’s book is cooler-headed and therefore more readable. But neither succeeds in convincing the reader that John Stonehouse was a remotely likable man.