John Stonehouse, My Father Read online

  JOHN STONEHOUSE, MY FATHER

  THE TRUE STORY OF THE RUNAWAY MP

  Julia Stonehouse

  Julia Stonehouse with her father, John, 1985.

  Photograph Terence Donovan © Terence Donovan Archive

  This book is dedicated to Michael P. O’Dell and

  Harry Richards – two gems among men.

  On 20th November 1974, British member of parliament, John Stonehouse, faked his death in Miami and, using a forged identity, entered Australia hoping to escape his old life and start anew. This is his true story. It involves spies, secret services, politics, high finance, and the love of two women.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1: Going Crazy

  2: Who Was John Stonehouse?

  3: ‘Hold Your Heads High and Behave as Though the Country Belonged to You’

  4: The Bangladesh Fund

  5: Lost in Translation: Could Be, Would Be, Might Be, May Be, or Will Be?

  6: Secrets and Lies

  7: The Madness of 1974

  8: Man Gone!

  9: Man Drowning

  10: The Reunion

  11: So Much for Comrades

  12: Three’s a Crowd

  13: Where to Next?

  14: Bonnie and Clyde are Back

  15: Off with Their Heads!

  16: Prisoner 334093 and the Broken Heart

  17: Freedom

  18: The Famous File

  19: The Mountain and the Molehill

  20: Secrets and the Security Services: MI5, MI6 and the CIA

  21: Fake News

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Plates

  Copyright

  1

  Going Crazy

  Between the 6th and 11th of November 1974 my father flew from London to Miami, to Houston, to Mexico City, to Los Angeles, to Atlanta, to Miami, to Chicago, to San Francisco, to Tampa, to Miami and back to London. He’d planned to fake his own death and go to Australia, so when he arrived at Miami on the 6th he’d passed through immigration as Stonehouse and then doubled back to join another immigration line and entered again on a false passport in the name of Joseph Markham. He was psychologically shattered and trying to break free of the personality of John Stonehouse, but was unable to do so.

  When he arrived in Miami, he booked into the beach-side Fontainebleau Hotel and phoned the National Bank of Miami to confirm his lunch meeting there the next day, to discuss the possibility of them buying a large block of shares in his banking company – originally called the British Bangladesh Trust, but now renamed the London Capital Group. He was hoping that a last-minute change of fortune could save him from the dire financial predicament he was in. He later wrote a book to explain his faked death and disappearance, Death of an Idealist, in which he said this meeting was ‘a straw to clutch’, asking, ‘Would it give me hope and pull me back from the brink of the extinction I was planning for myself?’1

  He woke early the next day to a beautiful tranquil morning and started making contingency arrangements. He needed somewhere to hide a set of dry clothes, so he walked along the beach and was surprised to find that, next to the Fontainebleau, the Eden Roc Hotel was shuttered closed, and its exterior area dilapidated and deserted. He’d stayed there as a minister on a tour of the States, and as he now stood by its dirty swimming pool he remembered his once confident and cheerful self. He wrote that he felt ‘as though I was looking back on myself through a long series of distorting mirrors. At the other end I could see the old me looking backwards through the same distorting mirrors with an expression of horror and incredulity.’ As he stood there, a broken man, he looked back on the successful man and the once successful man also looked at him. ‘I looked over the passage of time – in both directions – and shuddered.’2

  He drove to the airport and bought a ticket to Houston in the random name of George Lewis, no ID required. He also bought a suitcase and clothes, and put them in a big luggage locker, along with the false Markham passport and other documents in that name. He drove to the Fontainebleau, then walked back to the Eden Roc Hotel with a spare set of clothes and hid them in a telephone kiosk near the swimming pool he’d been at earlier. At the lunch meeting with the bank executives there was no positive news, and no pulling back from the brink. He was going. Back at the Fontainebleau, he put his Stonehouse passport and money into his document case, leaving them in his room and leaving his ticket for Los Angeles on the bedside table. He had planned to go there the next day to meet Harry Wetzel, the president of an aerospace company, the Garrett Corporation. Then he changed into swimming shorts and a shirt and headed for the beach. Leaving his shoes and shirt on the verandah, he got in the sea. He felt the water washing away the tensions of his past, like a baptism. He swam towards the Eden Roc; the sea and beach were deserted. After changing into the spare clothes he’d left in the phone kiosk, he strolled to the road, hailed a taxi to the airport, collected his suitcase with all the Joseph Markham paperwork, and flew to Houston.

  From there he flew to Mexico City, exiting the USA as Markham. The plan was to catch the once-weekly Qantas flight from Mexico City to Sydney, but there had been an agonising delay causing him to miss the flight by ten minutes. The quickest way to get to Australia now was to catch a flight from Los Angeles, so the next day, the 8th, he caught a plane to LA, entering the USA and booking into the airport Marriott Hotel as Markham. He wanted to rest until the flight later that night, but he’d stayed at that hotel before as Stonehouse, and the memories came flooding back. The planned meeting with Harry Wetzel had not been cancelled and his offices were only yards away. They’d been due to discuss a report he was writing for the Garrett Corporation on the future of the British aircraft industry which, as a former minister of aviation, he knew a great deal about. He decided to attend the meeting anyway, although he would now be late, and walked there. With each step he felt Markham ebbing away and Stonehouse returning. On his last visit to Wetzel, he’d noticed a book of M.C. Escher prints on the bookshelf, and it now seemed as he sat in that office that his state of mind was reflected by Escher’s labyrinthine puzzles and faultless blending of day into night, night into day, up to down, and down to up. By the time he returned to the Marriott Hotel, Markham had gone and it was Stonehouse who opened the room door. He felt disembodied: one half in California; the other missing in Florida.

  In mental turmoil, he phoned my mother. She remembers it as a short, garbled call, in which he said ‘he couldn’t take it anymore’. She thought he meant that he couldn’t take any more stress of trying to make business deals, not that ‘it’ meant his whole life. He told her he might not be back in time for the Remembrance Day service at his constituency, due to take place in two days on Sunday 10th, and asked that if he wasn’t back, could she go in his place. She wasn’t surprised to find him calling from LA, as he had planned to be there, but what she didn’t know was that his passport and clothes were in Miami, and he’d stayed the previous night in Mexico City.

  Reluctantly, he decided to return to London. He later wrote, ‘The pain and anguish of returning to Stonehouse was intense. Markham, for his part, resented the intrusion on his plans; he could see no point in returning to the empty charade in Britain, but Markham would not fight the blood ties which were dragging Stonehouse back like a powerful magnet.’ There were no available direct flights, so he flew to Atlanta, arriving at 4am on Saturday 9th, and caught a connecting flight to Miami. When he arrived back at the Fontainebleau Hotel it was clear that nobody had noticed he’d been gone almost two days. He felt as though he didn’t really exist. After a short nap, he woke to the full horror
that he was once again in his Stonehouse personality: ‘The horror of it hit me like a sledgehammer.’3

  Once more, he felt he had to escape. Again, he left all the Stonehouse belongings in his room, took some clothes for Markham to the Eden Roc Hotel, and went for another baptismal swim in the vast blue ocean. He wrote later that this time it was different: ‘Markham was stronger and determined to succeed. The philosophical haze of the previous swim was replaced by a harsh strong light. I could see it all clearly now. Stonehouse must definitely die.’ He caught a taxi to the airport but there were no available direct flights to LA or San Francisco, where he could get a connecting flight to Australia, so he flew to Chicago where he easily picked up a plane to San Francisco. As he sat there, heading West once again, more internal turmoil struck. ‘I felt suddenly oppressed, like a reluctant lemming. Why should I throw my being over the precipice even if I was doing it only metaphorically, and only in space and time, and with the technology of jet travel to help me? From the depths of my being an emotion of tremendous intensity rose within me. I went to the rear of the plane into the tiny toilet compartment and screamed at the reflection in the mirror. “Why do you do this to me?” But who was screaming – was it Stonehouse or was it Markham? The struggle between the two was tearing me to pieces.’4 In emotional agony, he wept.

  Stonehouse won that battle: ‘The umbilical cord was not severed after all. I must return to Miami and recreate my own identity.’ In San Francisco he bought a ticket back to Miami and, for the second consecutive night, flew from West coast to East coast arriving, after a detour to Tampa because of engine trouble, back in Miami. It was now Sunday the 10th of November and, once again, nobody at the hotel had noticed he’d gone missing. He felt it was fate – he could not escape. Meanwhile, my mother was walking in his place behind the band through the streets of Walsall and towards the church to remember the armistice and the fallen soldiers, silently anguishing about whatever mental trauma her husband was going through on the other side of the Atlantic. He flew overnight to London, feeling ‘like a condemned man, with the noose already around my neck, being dragged along to a hideous circus’.5 He arrived on the morning of Monday the 11th, went to his office in Dover Street, then to the House of Commons, and carried on apparently as normal. Nobody noticed he was silently exploding inside his head.

  Two days later my parents celebrated their 26th wedding anniversary by having dinner at their favourite restaurant, La Busola. My mother felt relieved that my father seemed to have recovered from his ‘I can’t take it anymore’ moment a few days earlier in America and didn’t realise that he was already operating in two distinct mental dimensions, and that this would be their last anniversary dinner. As she sat across the table from him, my mother had no idea my father had constructed an elaborate persona in the name of Joseph Markham, complete with bank accounts and plans to emigrate to Australia, plus bank accounts in yet another name – Clive Mildoon.

  My father had kept from my mother the extent of his financial difficulties, and the fact that for five years he’d been having an affair with his secretary, Sheila Buckley, who was 21 years younger than him. My mother knew my father had been under intense emotional pressure since 1969, when Josef Frolik, a defector from the StB, the communist Czech secret services, accused him of being one of their agents. That allegation, although unsubstantiated, had lost him his job in government and led to a group of right-wing establishment figures generating further rumour and unfounded allegations, which compounded his anxiety and stress. My mother also knew that my father took prescription drugs to counter the insomnia caused by all his problems. What nobody knew, however, was that those drugs were driving him crazy.

  My father’s bathroom cabinet was full of bottles of Mandrax and Mogadon. After he died in 1988, Sheila told the Daily Mail: ‘What I should have done which I now blame myself for was to insist he had medical help. He had been to see the House of Commons doctor and had been on Mandrax pills to sleep for the last two years. It should have been a warning to me but I did nothing about it.’6 My father was getting Mandrax (methaqualone) and Mogadon (nitrazepam) from a variety of sources, none of whom knew the extent of his drug taking. In those days, doctors carried around little green prescription pads and when my father saw an MP who was also a GP walking down the corridor of the House of Commons, he’d get a prescription from him. And from another, and another, and also from his own doctor. For two years he was self-medicating on a cocktail of the two drugs, essentially without medical supervision. An increased risk of suicide is a side effect of both drugs, and a tolerance of Mandrax develops rapidly so larger and larger doses become required for the same effect.

  Mandrax, known in the street drug trade as mandies or in the USA as Quaaludes, was widely prescribed in the 1970s for insomnia and anxiety, but has been banned in the UK and USA for over 30 years because of its now-recognised negative impact on mental health, including depression, anxiety, paranoia, mental confusion, poor decision-making and the increased risk of suicide. Taken with alcohol, Mandrax can be fatal. Mogadon is still available, but its recognised side effects include depression, with or without suicidal tendencies, impairment of judgement, and delusions. Today, people taking Mogadon are advised to consult their doctor if their behaviour becomes bizarre, and in 1974 my father’s behaviour was certainly that. Schizophrenia can develop as a result of psychological assault, which he was definitely suffering, but it’s also a reported side effect of benzodiazepines such as Mogadon. I believe the cocktail of Mandrax and Mogadon caused my father to spiral out of control and made him do some absolutely mad, out of character things, and contributed to what he called his ‘psychological suicide’.

  At my father’s trial, his barrister, Geoffrey Robertson, questioned Dr Maurice Miller MP, who my father sometimes ‘consulted’ at the House of Commons, and Miller told the court that over the course of 1974 my father’s character had changed and he ‘frequently sank into deep anxiety states’. Geoffrey Robertson later wrote ‘none of the independent experts in psychology or psychiatry we consulted had any doubt but that he had been clinically depressed. The private self lost faith in the public man: he seriously contemplated suicide, but designed instead a psychiatric equivalent: he would kill off John Stonehouse, MP, and return as Mr Markham or Mr Muldoon [sic] – anonymous and unambitious men whose ordinary joys he would savour.’7 But in the mid-70s nobody knew about the catastrophic effects Mandrax and Mogadon can have on a person’s mental state: not Dr Miller, not the General Medical Council, not the NHS, not Geoffrey Robertson, not the family, not Sheila, not the Judge and jury and not, even, my father.

  Depression is a strange thing in that a person can exist in a dual mental state, walking a parallel course: continuing to behave normally, and yet sometimes sinking into a dark, hopeless, suicidal space. Often the person’s family have no idea they’re experiencing the dark space and only see the person behaving normally. This is how we were before my father’s disappearance. Afterwards, we were aware of the dark times, and experienced them with him. Yet he could still appear to other people as normal, and that was a big part of his problem after he was discovered in Australia, and throughout the following legal proceedings.

  In the 1970s, mental health problems in men weren’t much talked about; men were expected to ‘deal with it’ and carry on. My father had a show to keep on the road, including employees he was responsible for, and a family. He didn’t have a group of male friends who could’ve supported him. He didn’t play cricket, rugby, football, golf, or any other ball game, so there was no tight team of sporty men who might understand him in his hour of need. The only game he played was the solitary game of chess, at which he usually beat his opponents. And by 1974, he’d come to detest the tribalism and hypocrisy of British politics, and pride would never have allowed him to reveal to old comrades what he was going through. Indeed, they were part of the problem.

  Meanwhile, he could feel the dark cloak of suspicion that he was a communist spy enveloping
him. The rumour wasn’t going away, it was circulating. On 20th September, two months before he disappeared, the satirical magazine Private Eye published a story saying two Labour MPs were under investigation by Special Branch, linking payments and spying to the Czech embassy. No names were given, but because the newspaper community, parliamentarians, and much of the establishment could guess this piece referred to John Stonehouse, it was a hard psychological blow. On the 15th November, Private Eye published ‘Bungler Dashed’ – a play on the word ‘Bangladesh’, a country my father was closely associated with. The article outlined my father’s career in the most disparaging terms and was a strange piece for the Eye because it was completely humourless and just a gratuitous character assassination full of false facts and inaccuracies.* When he was made aware of it a few days later, my father was furious and issued a writ and notice of seeking an injunction through solicitors Allen & Overy, who listed ten separate points of complaint. He was too late to stop publication, but hoped to get unsold copies withdrawn from the shops. Unfortunately he was unsuccessful.†

  On the 19th, my father flew back to Miami. This time he was travelling with Jim Charlton, the deputy chairman of his trade and export company Global Imex, and my mother hoped Jim’s presence would help him maintain emotional equilibrium. She was wrong. The next time my father went swimming in Miami’s inviting sea, he wouldn’t be coming back.

  * My father thought this article had the fingerprints of George Wigg all over it. The Machiavellian Wigg had been Harold Wilson’s former security liaison with MI5 and MI6. My father was so upset about the article, and my mother so worried about his reaction, she wrote to former home secretary Roy Jenkins, who was in Brussels at the time, saying the Labour Party was out of control and he needed to get back and sort them out. He sent a nice reply, saying that she was not the only one to suggest this.