The spying claims made against John Stonehouse and why his daughter brands them a 'myth'

ITV's new drama about former Black Country MP John Stonehouse, which aired its first episode on Monday, focuses on claims he was Czech spy.

During the three-part series, Stonehouse, viewers see the then-government minister being blackmailed into snooping on behalf of Czechoslovakia during the 1960s and 1970s, with questionable levels of success.

But was he really spying on behalf of the Eastern bloc country?

The truth is much less clear cut, and claims that Stonehouse was being paid by the Czechs have always been refuted by his daughter, Julia.

Stonehouse was first elected into Parliament as MP for Wednesbury in 1957. Five years later he had become Junior Minister of Aviation in Harold Wilson's Labour administration, his first government role before going on to become Postmaster General, where he would introduce first and second class mail. He was becoming a high-flyer and was being tipped as a future Prime Minister.

However, in 1969 rumours of espionage circulated when Josef Frolik, an ex-Czech spy who had defected to the US, outed Stonehouse to security services. Allegations included claims was paid £5,000, the equivalent of more than £70,000 in today’s money, for crucial information on Britain’s planes and future aviation plans.

The MP was left fighting for his career but remained calm under questioning by MI5’s infamous Cold War officer Charles Elwell, in the presence of Prime Minister Harold Wilson. He was questioned twice, and extensively so, but denied all the allegations. But his reprieve was short lived.

When Labour unexpectedly lost the 1970 general election, Stonehouse found himself on the backbenches after Wilson decided to keep him out of the shadow cabinet in a bid to avoid any potential scandal. When Wilson and Labour returned to government four years later, there was again no place for Stonehouse, who had to resort to business dealings in a bid to fund his lifestyle that would end in a very public scandal.

In 1975, months after faking his own death and being arrested in Australia, Stonehouse was still an MP and on bail awaiting trial for fraud and conspiracy.

He gave a speech in the House of Commons, denying he was a Czechoslovak spy, and blaming a mental breakdown for his behaviour.

“I assumed a new parallel personality that took over from me, which was foreign to me and which despised the humbug and sham of the past years of my public life,” he told a stunned chamber.

Stonehouse always denied being a spy up until his death in 1988 at the age of 62 after suffering a fourth heart attack. But the rumours have refused to go away.

In 2009 the first official history of M5, entitled The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, named Stonehouse as a Czech agent along with fellow Labour MPs Will Owen and Bob Edwards.

The book, written by the historian Christopher Andrew, revealed how the security service suspected trade union leaders and protesters against nuclear weapons of being potential subversives during the cold war in the 1960s. It also suggested that ministers were as keen as MI5 on monitoring their activities and phone conversations.

However, there was no evidence that the three MPs passed over sensitive information.

A year later it was reported that Margaret Thatcher had agreed to a cover-up when a second Czech defector said Stonehouse had been a spy. At a meeting in October 1980, the then-Prime Minister along with her Home Secretary and Attorney-General decided to keep quiet with the defector unwilling to appear in court and insufficient evidence.

A confidential minute from meeting said the Czech defector claimed to have been Stonehouse's controller in the late 1960s. The defector said a Czech security file stated that Stonehouse was a "conscious paid agent from about 1962" and had "after taking office in 1964 provided information about government plans and policies and about technological subjects including aircraft, and had been paid over the years about £5,000 in all".

The £5,000 claim was made in a book written by Julian Hayes, the son of Stonehouse’s nephew, who argued that the Czechs “advanced Stonehouse in excess of £5,000 (equivalent to over £76,000 today)”. Hayes has said that the research he carried out for his book, Stonehouse: Cabinet Minister, Fraudster, Spy, provided his great uncle worked for the Czechs for around a decade and was paid for doing so.

ITV's new drama has certainly used the spy claims extensively in the drama.

Matthew Macfadyen, who plays Stonehouse, suggested the MP "relished" the glamour of spying, believing he was Edward Fox or Roger Moore.

“In the story it happened when he was in Czechoslovakia. But I don’t think he was pouring forth an awful lot of critical material," he said.

"He did it for a while and he was paid. I enjoyed the idea, that we portray in this drama, that he relished the glamour of it. In his mind’s eye he was Edward Fox, Roger Moore - one of those guys in an overcoat with the collar turned up.

"A case of, ‘Well, if I’m going to be a spy, I might as well enjoy it.’ I imagine he created his own James Bond soundtrack in his head.”

Julia Stonehouse's reaction

However, Julia Stonehouse has always maintained her father was not a spy for the communist country.

Last year her book - John Stonehouse, My Father – The True Story of the Runaway MP, dissected these claims.

"He was very anti-communist, I remember stuffing envelopes for him while he was trying to stop the London Co-operative Society from being taken over by communists," she said.

Julia obtained a copy of his Czech security file, which she said not only has an incorrect address for where they lived, but also contained documents supposedly written by her father, but which bore no resemblance to his own handwriting.

Speaking last year when the book was released, she admitted: "People are going to believe what they have been told for nearly 50 years," accepting that it would be hard to change her father's memory after so much time.

"My hope is that in 20 or 30 years' time, when all our generation has died and gone, that some young kid will check out this Stonehouse girl and what she said."

She's also set up a website where she's publicly taken on those who have published or broadcast the spy rumours, saying that files from the old StB Czech secret services have been misrepresented over the last half a century.

There, she has said Frolik provided evidence that StB agents in London fabricated British “agents” and “contacts” for the purpose of pretending to pay them monies which the StB agents kept for themselves.

In May 2022, Julia wrote an open letter to the chair of Ofcom, the UK's broadcasting regulator, complaining about a Channel 4 documentary about Stonehouse called The Spy Who Died Twice.

In her letter, she wrote: "You will perhaps have noticed from the documentary itself that nobody can say, yet alone prove, what classified information my father handed to the Czechs. That’s because there is none; ergo he was not a spy."

She accused director Keely Winstone of 'propagating this myth', adding: "I think she is just cashing in because 'the spy' story sells. This is unfair to my father and our family, exploitative, and abusive, and that is why I am making this complaint."

Julia Stonehouse has also complained to ITV about the new drama. When the series was first announced in 2021, she said her "entire family have been and continue to be hurt by the spy claim, including not only my mother and siblings but Sheila and her son".

She continued: "In his lifetime, MI5 could find no evidence my father was a spy and since his death no de-classified documents have provided evidence. If the British government were never prepared to charge my father with the crime of treason, what gives John Preston, his producers, and ITV, the right to act as judge and jury? In any court of law evidence could be examined by the defence.

"However, you are collectively making extremely serious claims and plan to skip to the stage of financial exploitation without questioning. This is what I am contesting. The very least you owe the Stonehouse family is to provide documentary evidence that John Stonehouse was a spy.

"Certainly he met with persons at the Czech embassy as he a) twinned his constituency of Wednesbury with the Czech town of Kladno, and b) tried to sell them VC-10 commercial planes in his capacity as a minister - but that did not make him a spy. And if John Preston (writer) is prepared to claim that he was, he should also be prepared to substantiate that extremely serious claim with documentary evidence."

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