“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.
-
Political cartoons for December 7Cartoons Sunday’s political cartoons include the Trump-tanic, AI Santa, and the search for a moderate Republican
-
Trump’s poll collapse: can he stop the slide?Talking Point President who promised to ease cost-of-living has found that US economic woes can’t be solved ‘via executive fiat’
-
Sudoku hard: December 7, 2025The daily hard sudoku puzzle from The Week
-
Wake Up Dead Man: ‘arch and witty’ Knives Out sequelThe Week Recommends Daniel Craig returns for the ‘excellent’ third instalment of the murder mystery film series
-
Zootropolis 2: a ‘perky and amusing’ movieThe Week Recommends The talking animals return in a family-friendly sequel
-
Storyteller: a ‘fitting tribute’ to Robert Louis StevensonThe Week Recommends Leo Damrosch’s ‘valuable’ biography of the man behind Treasure Island
-
The rapid-fire brilliance of Tom StoppardIn the Spotlight The 88-year-old was a playwright of dazzling wit and complex ideas
-
‘Mexico: A 500-Year History’ by Paul Gillingham and ‘When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy’ by David Margolickfeature A chronicle of Mexico’s shifts in power and how Sid Caesar shaped the early days of television
-
Homes by renowned architectsFeature Featuring a Leonard Willeke Tudor Revival in Detroit and modern John Storyk design in Woodstock
-
Film reviews: ‘Hamnet,’ ‘Wake Up Dead Man’ and ‘Eternity’Feature Grief inspires Shakespeare’s greatest play, a flamboyant sleuth heads to church and a long-married couple faces a postmortem quandary
-
We Did OK, Kid: Anthony Hopkins’ candid memoir is a ‘page-turner’The Week Recommends The 87-year-old recounts his journey from ‘hopeless’ student to Oscar-winning actor
