Labour’s bad boys – Part 3 John Stonehouse

Our John is one of the more interesting cases. There have been multiple accusations of trade union leaders and Labour MPs taking the Russian shilling though you have to ask whether some of them could have been at all useful. Even the old duffer Michael Foot was outed as agent Boot though this was heavily denied at the time. Some in the CIA were convinced Harold Wilson really was working for the KGB. There was no proof but the smell lingers.

John Thompson Stonehouse was alleged to be an agent working for Czech Intelligence. At university Stonehouse was openly ambitious to get a parliamentary seat and he achieved this in 1957 becoming the member for Wednesbury (remember Janice Oi’ll give it foive on TV). He was Harold Wilson’s Minister for Posts and Telecommunication until Grocer Heath took over.

On 20th November 1974 he faked his own death, leaving a pile of clothes on a beach in Miami and promptly disappeared. There were even obituaries published. He had in fact cleared off to Melbourne where he planned to set up a new life in Australia with his mistress and secretary Sheila Buckley. Using various false identities he moved thousands around various banks but one of the tellers became suspicious and informed New South Wales finest. I say finest because the initial suspicion of the NSW plod was that he was in fact Lord Lucan.

He was arrested on 24 December 1974 and immediately applied for the position of Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds so as to resign as an MP. He was then extradited to the UK having forgotten to sign his application and continued to serve as an MP. No wonder they call it the House of Shame. Even more incredulous is that Labour, with a wafer thin majority, did not even expel him from the Party.

Eventually John was tried for fraud, theft, forgery and conspiracy for which he received a sentence of seven years and took up residence in Wormwood Scrubs. Latterly he suffered a lot with his heart and eventually succumbed to a heart attach in 1988. One of Labour’s more colourful characters.

As far as Czech intelligence is concerned, Storehouse allegedly began spying for them in 1962. In 1969 he had a meeting with Harold Wilson where he was informed that a Czech defector had asserted he was a Czech agent. John successfully defended himself. In 2009 the spy allegation was verified by Christopher Andrew in his book Defence of the Realm.
 

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