When John Stonehouse's clothes were found in a pile on Miami Beach on 20 November 1974, many people presumed that the UK Member of Parliament had drowned while swimming – until he turned up alive and well in Australia on Christmas Eve. In History looks at the stranger-than-fiction tale of the man who died twice. When John Stonehouse hatched his plan to disappear completely, he was a troubled man.
His political career had stalled, his dodgy business dealings left him facing financial ruin, he was accused of being a communist spy, and he was having an extra-marital affair with his secretary. In a move borrowed from the Frederick Forsyth novel, The Day of the Jackal , Stonehouse stole the identity of two dead men. He travelled on a business trip to Miami where he vanished, in November 1974, then hopped on another plane to Australia.
The ruse lasted just over a month. It was British aristocrat Lord Lucan , another infamous fugitive who disappeared around the same time, who would inadvertently lead him to get caught in Australia. And how did Stonehouse explain his actions? The British Member of Parliament insisted to the BBC in January 1975 that he was on "a fact-finding tour, not only in terms of geography but in terms of the inner self of a political animal".
To the British public in the late 1960s, he must have seemed like a man who had it all. Postmaster General at the age of 43, with a glamorous wife and three children, he was talked about as a future Labour prime minister..