“It’s a fantasy most of us have at some point,” said Blake Morrison in The Guardian: “to fake our death and fetch up in a distant country”.
In November 1974, the Labour MP John Stonehouse left his clothes on a Miami beach and then caught a flight to Australia using a false passport. His businesses were going under, rumours were growing that he was a spy, and he was having an affair with his secretary. “All of which led him to seek refuge in a new identity.”
Alas for him, Lord Lucan had disappeared a short while earlier, and when a mysterious Englishman turned up in Melbourne, someone tipped off the police – who found the supposedly dead MP instead. Returned to the UK, he was imprisoned for fraud and deception. Now his daughter has written a memoir in which she argues that Stonehouse, who died in 1988, was a decent man who has been much maligned.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Her defence relies on “Escher-like circular logic”, said Craig Brown in The Spectator. Julia doesn’t deny her father’s “crimes and misdemeanours”, which ranged from identity theft and embezzlement to the violent assault of his wife, Barbara. She argues that they were so “out of character” for this good man, they can only have been the result of “a mental breakdown, brought on by the purity of his ideals”.
Similarly, she accepts that her father took cash from the Czechs, said Max Hastings in The Sunday Times, but suggests he wasn’t a traitor, because the secrets he sold were not useful. It’s understandable that she should want to exonerate her father, but I doubt her attempts to explain away his deceit and folly will convince anyone.
Stonehouse was “a successful love rat but second-division politician, fourth-class traitor [and] bungling fraudster. I felt uncomfortable reading his squalid story, because he is best forgotten.”
Icon Books 416pp £16.99; The Week Bookshop £13.99
The Week Bookshop
To order this title or any other book in print, visit theweekbookshop.co.uk, or speak to a bookseller on 020-3176 3835. Opening times: Monday to Saturday 9am-5.30pm and Sunday 10am-4pm.
-
Who were the ‘weekend snipers’ of Sarajevo?Under the Radar Italian authorities launch investigation into allegations far-right gun enthusiasts paid to travel to Bosnian capital and shoot civilians ‘for fun’ during the four-year siege
-
A free speech debate is raging over sign language at the White HouseTalking Points The administration has been accused of excluding deaf Americans from press briefings
-
Glinda vs. Elphaba, Jennifer Lawrence vs. postpartum depression and wilderness vs. progress in November moviesthe week recommends This month’s new releases include ‘Wicked: For Good,’ ‘Die My Love’ and ‘Train Dreams’
-
‘Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America’ and ‘Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary’feature The culture divide in small-town Ohio and how the internet usurped dictionaries
-
6 homes with fall foliagefeature An autumnal orange Craftsman, a renovated Greek Revival church and an estate with an orchard
-
Bugonia: ‘deranged, extreme and explosively enjoyable’Talking Point Yorgos Lanthimos’ film stars Emma Stone as a CEO who is kidnapped and accused of being an alien
-
The Revolutionists: a ‘superb and monumental’ bookThe Week Recommends Jason Burke ‘epic’ account of the plane hijackings and kidnappings carried out by extremists in the 1970s
-
Film reviews: ‘Bugonia,’ ‘The Mastermind’ and ‘Nouvelle Vague’feature A kidnapped CEO might only appear to be human, an amateurish art heist goes sideways, and Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Breathless’ gets a lively homage
-
Book reviews: ‘Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity’ and ‘Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice’feature An examination of humanity in the face of “the Machine” and a posthumous memoir from one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, who recently died by suicide
-
The dazzling coral gardens of Raja AmpatThe Week Recommends Region of Indonesia is home to perhaps the planet’s most photogenic archipelago
-
Salted caramel and chocolate tart recipeThe Week Recommends Delicious dessert can be made with any biscuits you fancy
