In 1970 the Labour MP for Morpeth, Will Owen, was charged with being an agent of the StB, Czechoslovakia’s secret service. The man who had named him was Josef Frolik, a Czechoslovak defector, who said Owen was on a £500 monthly retainer organised by Robert Husak, another intelligence officer at the Czechoslovak embassy in London. Owen, Frolik said, had been passing secrets to...
Stonehouse: Cabinet Minister, Fraudster, Spy by Julian Hayes. John Stonehouse, My Father: The True Story of the Runaway MP by Julia Stonehouse. In a statement to the House of Commons, John Stonehouse explained that he’d ‘assumed a new, parallel personality that took over from me, which was foreign to me, and which despised the humbug and shame of the past years of my public life’. But as became clear during his trial, when it came to planning his disappearance he had acted rationally and effectively. As his barrister put it, ‘if it were madness, there was too much method in it to ever convince a jury.’