SCANDAL
Stonehouse: Cabinet Minister, Fraudster, Spy
Julian Hayes,
Robinson, $55

If ever there was a real-life political scandal demanding to be adapted for the screen in a British-Australian co-production, it is the astonishing story of John Stonehouse MP. In the 1960s, the English politician served as a cabinet minister in the Labour government led by Harold Wilson and, as indicated by the subtitle of this book, was a corporate crook and a traitor.

Australians played a significant role in identifying and arresting Stonehouse, and several were also among those who assisted him during subsequent legal proceedings in England. These included the then rising junior barrister Geoffrey Robertson, who represented Stonehouse for a short time before his client decided, disastrously for as it turned out, to represent himself in a trial at the Old Bailey that ended in multiple convictions and a substantial prison sentence.

Ambitious, handsome and charismatic, Stonehouse was an egomaniac with a limitless capacity for making trouble for himself and everyone around him, especially his long-suffering family. He might have got away with it but for hubris.

In 1974, while an MP and member of the Privy Council, Stonehouse decided to forestall inevitable financial ruin by faking his death. He left a towel on a beach near a hotel in Miami and travelled on a false passport to Melbourne. There he had hoped to be reunited both with his mistress, who worked as his parliamentary secretary and aided in the elaborate deception, and the large amount of money Stonehouse had defrauded from a network of companies he had set up with the unwitting assistance of his solicitor nephew, Michael Hayes.

This book is the nearest thing we have to a definitive account of the Stonehouse affair. Julian Hayes is a senior British lawyer as well as the son of Michael Hayes. In researching this fascinating and thoroughly absorbing book, he confirmed that Stonehouse took payments from the Soviet-era Czech secret service, which recruited him as a spy in the 1960s, though it seems it may have been ripped off just like Stonehouse’s family and business associates.

According to Hayes, the state archives of what is now the Czech Republic indicate Stonehouse took large amounts of cash from his handlers while somehow failing to provide them with any useful intelligence in return. “Stonehouse was not a spy or agent in the terms that we understand them in the novels of John le Carré and Ian Fleming,” writes Hayes. “He hadn’t provided the Czechs with anything significant and the disappointment in their filed reports is palpable.” Stonehouse seems more reminiscent of le Carré’s fraudster father, Ronnie.

The arrest in Melbourne of Stonehouse, who rented a Flinders Street apartment while using two false identities taken from deceased constituents Joseph Markham and Donald Mildoon, largely came about as the result of his inability to blend into a crowd. An eagle-eyed bank employee on his lunch break noticed a furtive looking character going in and out of different banks with large amounts of cash and alerted his manager, who in turn contacted the police.