John Stonehouse, My Father
Page 35
Inaccurate reporting is not just about getting the facts wrong accidentally. It can be about twisting the facts so it makes the reporter look knowledgeable, ‘in the know’, or creating a ‘reality’ that simply does not exist. Ultimately, it’s all about making money. One master of this dark craft was Chapman Pincher who, on 2nd January 2006, wrote a piece entitled ‘STONEHOUSE WAS A SOVIET SPY’ for the Daily Express. The whole article was a plethora of unsubstantiated rumour and out-and-out lies, but a particularly annoying paragraph was this, referring to them apparently meeting after my father had come out of prison: ‘When I asked him about the spying allegations he smiled and said: “Why don’t we both fly out to America and interview Joe Frolik,” indicating (deliberately I suspected) that he had met the defector and knew him well enough to call him Joe.’6 This is outrageous because Pincher knew perfectly well that my father had never met Frolik, yet he would go so low, in journalistic terms, as to say that my father implicated himself. Everyone who discussed Frolik ad infinitum called him ‘Joe’, because that’s what he called himself. If this conversation happened at all, my father would have been saying, in essence, let’s go to America and confront Frolik once and for all, but Pincher manages to twist things into an admission of guilt on the part of my father. My father had been dead eighteen years, and Pincher was still squeezing him dry. What had begun as an unsubstantiated rumour in 1969 had morphed, 37 years later, into an admission of guilt, on the part of the accused, no less!
And it carries on. Theo Barclay, a barrister by profession, wrote in The Times on 22nd February 2018, ‘While on holiday in his mid-thirties in 1959, the married MP was approached by a mystery temptress. Later recalling the one-night stand, he said the vixen sent “sensations of joy into every crevice of his brain.” She spurred him on to “one last magnificent thrust” before he rolled over, looked up and – to his horror – spied a camera in the ceiling that had filmed the whole encounter. From then on, fearful of his infidelity being exposed, he was on the StB’s payroll.’ When Barclay writes ‘Later recalling the one-night stand’ he is, in fact, taking text from a novel my father wrote called Ralph, and turning it into an admission of guilt from the author’s actual life. Barclay knows perfectly well that this scenario and its quotes come from the pages of the fictional work Ralph, but he presents it in The Times as my father being caught in a real-life honeytrap. He has added the word ‘last’ before ‘thrust’, and invented a ‘camera’ being ‘spied’, but the infinitely more important point is that he’s turning words from a novel into an admission of guilt. The article additionally contains the highly damaging claim that ‘he passed plans for a new bomber aircraft to his handler’.7 Among the inaccuracies in Barclay’s 2018 book Fighters and Quitters, is his reference to the speech my father made in the House of Commons on 20th October 1975, in which Barclay uses two quotes that did not come from that speech at all. The speech is readily available online so there really is no excuse, and he makes things worse by ‘topping’ his quotes with comments about the Speaker, and ‘tailing’ it with a quote from someone remarking on the real speech, not the words Barclay uses in their place.*
I thought Barclay turning words from a work of fiction into an admission of being a real-life spy was crossing a line, so I made a complaint to his professional body. Even though I sent the Bar Standards Board five supporting documents they replied that they couldn’t see there was evidence that Barclay had deliberately or intentionally made the leap from fiction to fact. Apparently, Barclay can write what he likes with impunity. Nobody has ever apologised to the Stonehouse family for their peddling in misinformation. The reason for that is fairly obvious: an apology admits fault, which could have legal repercussions.
On 15th January 2006, two years before the StB file on my father was released for public view by the Czech secret service archives in Prague, the Mail on Sunday ran a four-page article based on ‘a copy of the file … stored on microfiche, which has now fallen into private hands’. It’s hard to take too seriously material that is potentially stolen or incomplete, and is certainly from an unofficial source, but that didn’t stop the newspaper giving it the title ‘STONEHOUSE WAS A CZECH SPY’. It goes into some detail about the ‘arrangements for meetings’ in which ‘letters would be sent regularly to the MP’s London home, containing a clipping from the foreign news pages of The Times, always with the date intact’.8 What it doesn’t say, because the journalist didn’t bother to check, is that the MP never lived at the only address the StB ever had for him. Among the plethora of inaccuracies was the usual fantasy that, after his disappearance, he’d ‘settled in Melbourne, Australia, with his mistress Sheila Buckley’ – proving once again that known facts are no impediment to ‘a good story’. The next day, the 16th January, Chapman Pincher of the Daily Express jumped on the renewed-interest bandwagon with a re-run of the completely groundless Concorde allegations: ‘Minister sold our Concorde secrets to KGB’. The opening sentence told the readers: ‘He was a traitor in our midst, a high-ranking government minister who sold the nation’s secrets to spymasters behind the Iron Curtain.’9
As well as being branded a communist spy, my father has been accused of being a fascist sympathiser. In September 2019 Ferdinand Mount, once head of the Number 10 Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher, reviewed a book about Enoch Powell in The London Review of Books, in which he accused my father of being ‘an ally’ of Powell, slipping in, with no explanation, that he joined the English National Party when he returned from Australia. Reading this with no background, it would be all too easy to think my father was really a racist or even fascist (Hitler is quoted in the following column). I feel I need to put this accusation into context because there is no way my father was ‘an ally’ of Powell. On 17th February 1968 the Express & Star, a West Midlands-based local paper, ran a half-page article asking seventeen MPs from the area, including Powell, what they had to say about the racial tension then being caused after many Asians came to the area, having been affected by Kenya’s ‘Africanisation’ policy. Ernest Prince, the reporter, introduced the seventeen short quotes by saying: ‘The number of “dependants” coming here to join Commonwealth immigrants allowed in with work permits now far exceeds what was envisioned. Many loopholes for the dodgers are becoming apparent … like the “24 hours in Britain and you’re free to stay” one which was plugged two days ago.’10 Within this broader immigration policy topic, one of the questions of the time was whether Sikh men could wear turbans, instead of uniform caps, when working for the transport company. My father was probably insensitive to the fact that the turban is a religious requirement, rather than a cultural preference, although he was soon put right and was involved in the negotiations that led to Sikhs wearing turbans in the standard navy-blue uniform colour. His whole take on immigration was that people should integrate, mix culturally, and this is why he said: ‘The Sikh community’s campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.’11 Powell used this quote in his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in Birmingham on 20th April 1968. Sixty years later, Ferdinand Mount writes: ‘Stonehouse had denounced as a “canker” the campaign by local Sikh bus conductors to be allowed to wear their turbans at work’12 – completely omitting the full quote, where my father said that ‘communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another’. My father can be blamed for being ignorant at the time about the religious nature of the turban, but he can be praised for helping solve the problem once informed. Also, he can be blamed for being naïve enough to think different cultures can easily integrate if they try to be less communally-minded, but he cannot be accused of being ‘an ally’ of Powell, because he was not.
Information is the blood flow of society, but when it is abused by exaggeration or contrived omission an insult is made to the society that information is meant to inform. My family have been very much wronged by all sorts of writing – including that by Czech spies and British journalists – and for us it is too late. But I implore contemporary and future journalists to beware the temptation to be lazy and skip original document research, or twist words into untruth for sensationalism and ‘clicks’. That is not, after all, what their readers expect, and pay for.
Ever since the 1969 spy accusation first found its way into the parliamentary gossip mill and onto the pages of the press, my father has been utterly misrepresented and maligned. At the same time, he was a cash machine for the many journalists who know that the more dramatic their stories, the better they sell. For some, especially during the 1970s, their negativity was designed to gain right-wing political advantage. But beyond this, my father was, and still is, presumed guilty of being a communist spy and that gave people licence to punish him when he was alive, and trash his memory now he’s dead. Nobody likes a traitor. My family are only glad of one thing: we didn’t go through these experiences during the internet age. The Orwellian ‘hate’, ‘hate’, ‘hate’ was palpable in the 1970s, and I can’t imagine how that would feel now.
If anyone is suffering from the delusion that the internet brought ‘fake news’ into the world, I can tell them from personal experience, there’s nothing new about fake news. Commentators today complain that social media has trapped people in ‘information bubbles’, but the negative Stonehouse information bubble came about because when one journalist came out with a bad story about my father, other journalists didn’t check those ‘facts’, print our denials, or simply present a more balanced view. They instead absorbed that original negative story, and then amplified it with more lies and misrepresentations. The problem with a misinformation bubble such as ours is that it so easily morphed into ‘the truth’, then ‘common knowledge’, and then ‘history’. Unbalanced reporting has always been a form of brainwashing; we didn’t have to wait for the internet for that.
* The two quotes Barclay purports on page 47 of his book Fighters and Quitters to have been spoken by my father in the House of Commons come from page 182 of Death of an Idealist by John Stonehouse (although Barclay’s quote omits the crucial word ‘too’ from a sentence in which my father includes himself: ‘Members around me were robots too, voting on issues which they did not bother to understand …’), and from a letter dated 26th January 1975, to Edward Short MP, published in First Report from the Select Committee on the Right Honourable Member for Walsall, North, Session 1974–75, HMSO, 11th March 1975, page 10. The quote Barclay ‘tails’ the speech with is from pages 534–535 of Bernard Donoughue’s book Downing Street Diary, London, Jonathan Cape, 2004.
Notes
Proceedings in the House of Commons and reproduced in Hansard, as well as select committee reports contain parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0. Documents in The National Archives, as well as personal correspondence from The Home Office contain public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Chapter 1
1. John Stonehouse, Death of an Idealist, London: WH Allen, 1975, page 172.
2. Ibid, page 173.
3. Ibid, page 179.
4. Ibid, page 181.
5. Ibid, page 181.
6. Sheila Stonehouse, ‘Why I loved this man’, by Diana Hutchinson, Daily Mail, 15th April 1988, page 12.
7. Geoffrey Robertson, The Justice Game, London: Chatto & Windus, 1998, page 68.
Chapter 2
1. London Co-operative Society Archive: 306, No. 2 Sub-Committee reports (Sept. 1960–Aug. 1961) 30th January 1961 ‘The development of the food trades department’.
2. The Grocer, 6th April 1963.
3. John Stonehouse in ‘Crossroads’ News Sheet No. 1 of The Co-operative Reform Group, 1963, ‘Comment’, pages 2, 4.
Chapter 3
1. John Stonehouse, Prohibited Immigrant, London: Bodley Head, 1960, pages 186–7: quoting Clyde Sanger in Central African Examiner, quoting Rhodesia Herald.
2. The Birmingham Post, 27th February 1959, page 1.
3. The Birmingham Post, 21st March 1959, page 1.
Chapter 4
1. Fred Wenner, ‘Yard mystery of Stonehouse fund’, Daily Mail, 2nd December 1974, page 22.
2. Michael Sherrard, London Capital Group (formerly British Bangladesh Trust Limited): investigation under section 165 (b) of the Companies Act, London: H.M.S.O., pages 353–4.
3. ‘Should Mr Stonehouse Be Paroled?’, The Times, 17th November 1978.
4. Michael O’Dell, ‘Mr Stonehouse and parole’, letters section, The Times, 18th November 1978.
5. Bruce Douglas-Mann, letters section, The Times, 21st November 1978.
6. Geoffrey Levy, ‘He faked his death, fled Britain with his lover and was spared spying charges … So was Labour minister John Stonehouse – the real Reggie Perrin – a spy?’, dailymail.co.uk, 8th January 2011, accessed 17th November 2020.
Chapter 5
1. ‘John Stonehouse got U.K. millions,’ Express & Star, 18th March 1967, page 20.
2. Michael Sherrard, London Capital Group (formerly British Bangladesh Trust Limited): investigation under section 165 (b) of the Companies Act, London: H.M.S.O., page 66.
3. Ibid.
4. Peter Pettman quoted by Richard Milner and Anthony Mascarenhas, ‘Five questions on the British Bangladesh Trust’, Sunday Times, 19th November 1972.
5. Michael Sherrard, London Capital Group (formerly British Bangladesh Trust Limited): investigation under section 165 (b) of the Companies Act, London: H.M.S.O., page 62.
6. John Stonehouse, Death of an Idealist, London: WH Allen, 1975, page 141.
7. Michael Sherrard, London Capital Group (formerly British Bangladesh Trust Limited): investigation under section 165 (b) of the Companies Act, London: H.M.S.O., page 71.
8. ‘Accomplice’s letters trapped Stonehouse’, Sunday Times, 29th December 1974, page 3.
Chapter 6
1. ‘Note for the record’ of meeting between Callaghan and Mayhew, prepared by Ken Stowe, 12th July 1978, The National Archives File PREM 16/1848, page 2.
2. Cabinet Room ‘Notes for the Record’ by James Callaghan, 12:45 14th July 1978, The National Archives File PREM 16/1848, Document 11, page 2.
3. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of The Realm, London: Allen Lane, 2009, page 707.
4. Ibid, pages 707–8.
5. Josef Frolik, The Frolik Defection – Memoirs of an Intelligence Agent, London: Leo Cooper, 1975, page 97.
6. Ken Stowe to Harold Wilson, 4th July 1977, The National Archives File PREM 16/1848.
7. John Hunt to Mr Wood for the attention of Prime Minister James Callaghan, 15th December 1977, ‘Line to Take’ attachment, ‘Allegations about Czech Intelligence Service contacts with trade unionists and with Mr John Stonehouse’, page 1, The National Archives File PREM 16/1848.
8. ‘Note for the record’ of meeting
between Callaghan and Mayhew, prepared by Ken Stowe, 12th July 1978, The National Archives File PREM 16/1848, page 1.
9. Gordon Corera, BBC, 25th June 2012, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18556213, accessed 29th June 2019.
10. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of The Realm, London: Allen Lane, 2009, page 708.
11. Robert Armstrong to Margaret Thatcher, 7th July 1980, The National Archives File PREM 19/360, Document 1, page 1.
12. Robert Armstrong to Margaret Thatcher, 11th September 1980, The National Archives File PREM 19/360, Document 3.
13. Clive Whitmore (PPS to PM) to John Halliday (Home Office), 6th October 1980, The National Archives File PREM 19/360, Document 7, page 1.
14. Ibid.
15. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of The Realm, London: Allen Lane, 2009, page 708.
Chapter 7
1. Christopher Sweeney, ‘Defector reveals MPs’ part in spy ring’, The Times, 25th January 1974, page 8.
2. Michael Sherrard, London Capital Group (formerly British Bangladesh Trust Limited): investigation under section 165 (b) of the Companies Act, London: H.M.S.O., pages 135, 177, 185, 186.
3. Ibid., page 133.
4. Ibid, pages 3, 105.
5. Ibid, page 26.
6. Ibid, page 278.
7. ‘Diplomatic Bag’, Private Eye, 20th September 1974, page 3.
8. Judge Eveleigh, Sentencing Statement, Friday 6th August 1976 at the Old Bailey, The National Archives File J 82/3714, page 77.
Chapter 8
1. ‘Where is the Missing MP?’, Daily Mirror, 27th November 1974, page 1.
2. Alan Rainbird, ‘The Real John Stonehouse’, Sunday Times, Letters and Correspondence, page 15.