The perfectly normal response to Stonehouse is to reach for one’s phone, tap in a few characters and ask: did this really happen? The answer is, yes, it very largely did – and even the parts “imagined” for dramatic purposes aren’t that far off.
The three-part comic drama, made for ITV, is the story of John Stonehouse, the British Labour MP and one-time cabinet minister who provoked a media sensation in 1974 by faking his own death on a beach in Florida, leaving behind a wife and three children. False passports obtained with identities stolen from two dead constituents – Stonehouse visited their widows and extracted information under the pretence of offering sympathy – got him to Australia. There, it all fell apart. He was rumbled when a suspicious bank teller alerted police after he withdrew more than $20,000 in cash then promptly deposited it at a nearby branch of the Bank of New Zealand. The cops arrested him in the mistaken belief that he was the missing Lord Lucan.
There is, remarkably, so much more to the story than that – enough that it could have been told any number of ways. Writer John Preston has form in these matters – he authored the book on which political drama A Very British Scandal, the Jeremy Thorpe story, was based. He draws a Stonehouse who is vacuous, ambitious, and ultimately more than a little ridiculous. He’s aided tremendously by the lead performance of Matthew Macfadyen (Succession), playing a man capable of gaslighting himself to rising star status in the swinging 60s, only to become hopelessly trapped in his own web. Macfadyen embodies Stonehouse as a sort of vulnerable peacock, to the extent that we even feel some sympathy for the man who is shagging his secretary and lying to everyone else.
In fact, he plays him so lavishly as to drown out the other performances, including that of the redoubtable Keeley Hawes as Stonehouse’s poor, faithful wife. Macfadyen and Hawes are, of course, married, having met while they were both starring in the MI5 spy show Spooks.
Preston’s imagination is most exercised in the first episode, which deals with Stonehouse’s recruitment by Czech intelligence in the 1960s. Stonehouse’s daughter Julie, now 71, continues to insist this never happened and that documented evidence that has emerged since – detailing meetings between Stonehouse and his handler and cash payments – was simply Czech spies trying to impress their bosses. But Julian Hayes, a great-nephew of Stonehouse who has written a book about the case, told the Guardian the spying undoubtedly happened – just not as Preston has written it.
Hayes said his great-uncle was not, as the TV show has it, honey trapped into spying by a glamorous Czech operative, but rather reeled in by “slow insidious grooming … They massaged his ego and gained his trust.” It’s unclear whether Stonehouse was as useless a spy as he appears, but that was not what brought him down. Remarkably, both Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher opted to look the other way, fearing that MI6 did not have enough evidence to pin a case.
What did for Stonehouse was his chaotic and ultimately fraudulent business life, much of which revolved around an under-capitalised Bangladeshi bank. After being deported from Australia, he was convicted on 20 of 21 fraud charges and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment.
There is yet more – among other things, Stonehouse later suffered a heart attack on a live TV chat show – and dramatic liberties and all, Preston has shaped the true story into a beguiling and entertaining TV yarn.
Stonehouse, BBC UKTV, from Monday, September 18, 8.35pm; Sky Go
