Dazzling depiction of an absolute rotter

Matthew Macfadyen plays John Stonehouse, the MP who faked his own death and brought shame on himself and his long-suffering wife, played by Keeley Hawes

Which of us hasn’t wanted to run away from our troubles at one time or another – before resisting the temptation and instead facing up to those responsibilities? But the lure of an easy escape proved to be all too much for one politician whose youthful energy and handsome looks had once seen him tipped as a possible future Prime Minister.

Now the extraordinary story of John Stonehouse (Matthew Macfadyen) is told as a brilliantly entertaining three-part drama that is packed with bizarre twists and turns and moments of laughout-loud black comedy gold.

The stranger-than-fiction tale recounts how the Labour MP had seen his once promising political career hit the buffers and then face financial ruin as one business after another collapsed. Instead of facing the music, the plan Stonehouse dreamed up in 1974 was to fake his own death, leaving behind only his clothes in a neat pile on a Miami beach before he walked into the sea, seemingly never to return.

He had abandoned his wife Barbara (Keeley Hawes) and their three children in Britain to mourn his loss as his death was reported across the world – until he made the news again just weeks later when he was spotted in Australia, living under an assumed identity he had adopted using a ruse inspired by the film The Day Of The Jackal.

Perhaps it should have come as no surprise when the world later learned that the man who had tossed aside his family for his mistress had also been a spy for Communist Czechoslovakia when he was a Minister in Harold Wilson’s government in the 1960s.

With a scintillating script by John Preston (author of the bestselling account of the Jeremy Thorpe affair, A Very English Scandal), this is a captivating study of deceit, treason and fraud, told in a dazzling style that has winning echoes of the Steven Spielberg film Catch Me If You Can. Macfadyen is compelling if wholly unlovable as he plays the ultimate selfish boor and prize chump, whose ambition, greed and strangely high self-esteem is matched only by the totality of his blindness to his own faults.

Alongside him, Hawes depicts the wrenching pain of Barbara as the long-suffering wife who was eventually to be shamelessly betrayed and humiliated in the most public way imaginable. The fact that Macfadyen and Hawes have in real life been happily married to each other for almost 20 years only gives the viewer another layer of fascination to delight in as we watch their masterclass double act.