Matt Hancock is like John Stonehouse, says writer
JOHN STONEHOUSE was “very Matt Hancock”, the writer of a new drama about the Labour MP who faked his own death has said.
John Preston, the acclaimed author behind an ITV series about the events, said that the political climate was “not dissimilar” to that of the 1970s, when Parliament was rocked by scandals.
Stonehouse was facing fraud charges in 1974 when he left his clothes on a Miami beach and disappeared before assuming a false identity and attempting to start a new life with his secretary in Australia. The former MP for Walsall North was caught when police mistook him for Lord Lucan and arrested him. He was jailed for seven years and tried to reinvent himself as a thriller writer on his early release for good behaviour.
Mr Preston compared Stonehouse to Matt Hancock, the former health secretary who took part in I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! – a reality TV show.
“Stonehouse was very Matt Hancock,” Mr Preston said. “A politician being weirdly disinclined to look in the mirror and think, am I behaving like a total a---?” Stonehouse is not the first controversial politician Mr Preston has written about. His book about Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal Party leader, and the plot to murder his lover, Norman Scott, was adapted by the BBC in 2018 for a series starring Hugh Grant.
Mr Preston told the Christmas issue
of Radio Times that he has “had a very good run with mid-1970s reprobates”. The “completely bonkers time” had proved good for drama as it was “not dissimilar to the ones we’re living through now – a period of extreme instability and tension,” he said.
Stonehouse, a three-part drama, airs on ITV in January, with Succession star Matthew Macfadyen in the title role.