Stonehouse: too clever for his own good

Press, 14 August 1976, Page 12

Stonehouse: too clever for his own good

The British member of Parliament, Mr John Stonehouse, has been found guilty of 18 charges of theft and false pretences and has begun to serve a seven-year sentence. Corinna Adam, of the “Sunday Times,” London, looks at the career of a man who was once an outstanding member of the Labour Party and who ended in gaol after inquiries into the activities of companies and charities of which he w T as a director.

Disaster, or near-disaster, attended the whole of John Stonehouse’s career. He has been described as a potential Prime Minister, only prevented by recently-developed fatal flaws from progressing smoothly to the top. The facts are different.

Of all the young Labour M.P.s of his generation (he was elected to Wednesbury, Staffordshire, in 1957 at the age of 31) he was the one predicted as most likely to succeed. He seemed to have everything on his side — qualities which indeed he still retains — charm, looks, a kind of cleverness, and an enormous capacity for hard graft. But despite it all, the seeds of failure were planted early on. There are those who , — perhaps with the benefit 'of hindsight — say they mistrusted him from an early age. The “brilliance” which the media perceived in him is questioned by his tutors at the London School of Economics, to which he went in 1947. One, William Pickles, the political scientist, says: “He was certainly not as clever as he thought he was. He was overbearing with his fellow-students, sure he knew everything,

and very sure of himself. His worst weakness was the way he overrated his own ability, and he was totally unable to .see anyone else’s point of view but his own. He was z a sort of conspiracy by himself against himself. I find it easy, post hoc, to think he is a crook. He looked shifty; he always looked over your left shoulder when he talked to you.” His mother, Rose, ’ says “John always knew what he wanted.” One trouble was that he made it all too clear, right from the beginning. The British like their Labour politicians to make at least a pretence of humility, of being just an ordinary chap. Stonehouse never bothered. Even in his first job — working for the Co-op in East Africa between 1952 and 1954 — his idealism was to a large extent nullified by his egoism. The job consisted of setting up co-operative farms in Uganda. Some succeeded; many attempts had disastrous results. One observer commented later: “He misunderstood the nature of the (Baganda) people. They are proud, intensely individualistic, and could never be made to work together in that kind of way. He not

only failed to get through ’ them, but he failed to ge that rather obvious far through to himself. Iseemed as though he had a blind spot.” After two years, Stonehouse returned' to England: his detractors see this as a characteristic instance of his abandoning a job half-done. There were also some dire rumours spread by his opponents in the Co-operative movement of mismanagement of funds, backed by a tale of an unhonoured personal guarantee. But that was paid off, and the other rumours were never substantiated.

Stonehouse’s interest in Africa continued; and it was genuinely idealistic as well as intensely curious. In 1960, he went to the Congo to investigate the war. Although he was, by now, a fairly well-known M.P., he masqueraded as a reporter, “Mr Smith”: the first recorded instance of his adopting a phony personality, if in this case for reasons which might be thought admirable. Coming on top of his continuing battle against the existence of the white-dominated Central African Federation, the episode did him a lot of good with the Labour Party, and it got him headlines. He was such a dashing figure that some of his faults tended to be overlooked. But he was not widely liked among politicians. After he won Wednesbury, he made an arrogant acceptance speech and refused to shake hands with his opponent, Peter Tapsell — though, typically, he later wrote him a graceful letter. His maiden speech in the House was described as “ranting" and “uncontrolled.” In the - House of Commons, one colleague says, “he never fitted into the Club. He was never around in the tea-room.” He offended the sensibilities of other M.P.s in paradoxical ways — for instance, by working too hard when they were drinking or gossiping. He broke unwritten rules right to the end — astonishingly, a couple of weeks after being released on bail last autumn he took his mistress, Sheila Buckley, to lunch in the members’ cafeteria and was genuinely surprised when no-one talked to him. In spite of his unpopularity, however, and the feeling that he was a bit too obviously on the make, Harold Wilson recognised ability in him — perhaps precisely his ability to make money. In 1964 he was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Aviation, and proved something of a super-salesman. But he took his chief failure — to sell the Super VCIO to 8.0.A.C. — personally, and expressed it vehemently to the Cabinet. He felt that it was

wrong that an American plane (the Boeing 707) should be preferred to a British one, and if the reason was that more money was needed, then more money should have been forthcoming. A portent? One of his commercial colleagues of the seventies says: “John was a great believer in spending for ultimate profit — constant injections of credit, fluid money. The trouble was that he would do this when everyone else in sight was drawing in their horns.” His successes were often marred by sheer insensitivity. On an all-party visit to Mauritius to discuss their new constitution he took the opportunity of making a party political speech, roundly abusing his Conservative colleagues. When he was Undersecretary of State for the Colonies, he earned great admiration in Zambia for the constitution he was instrumental tn producing — and then misbehaved at ’he independence celebrations. It is said, though, that it was his ability constantly to “get. away” in these jobs that kept him going at all. Certainly he has always been some sort of escapist, even if it only involved travelling round Britain rather than stayi"g at the House or in his constituency, on the end of a phone. He always enjoy. 1 boyish competition, like the time when, holidaying in Yugoslavia, he challenged his friend and fellow-M.P. Andrew Faulds to swim round a distant island with him. Faulds refused; Stonehouse plunged in and was not seen for four hours. When he “disappeared” off Miami, Faulds was convinced that he had been playing the same sort of solitary game — and drowned. Escapism may even by a family trait — his elder brother Bill, a 8.0.A.C. pilot, took a job in Singapore a few years ag and then left homo overnight, without a word to his wife or children. Bui is now said to be “making a new life in New Zealand.”

John Stonehouse’s Govern-ment-sponsored globetrotting came to an end in 1967, when he was made Minister of State for Technology. It was the mixture as before: the unfortunate impression Stonehouse made on some of his political associates, their reaction, his counterreaction. If he had been thought “arrogant” in the House previously, as a Minister he was often thought intolerable.

He began to be paranoid about the press — a paranoia which, inc.dentally, culminated in 1975, when he accused The Sunday Times of “starting his whole problem by its malicious article in November, 1972, on the British Bangladesh Trust . . .” The message began, apparently, to seep through to Harold Wilson. There are several M.P.s who will say, off the record, that when Wilson gave Stonehouse the job of Postmaster-General, “he hoped he’d mess it up so that he’d have an excuse to get rid of him.” By now Stonehouse's certainty that he was destined for greatness was more obsessive than ever, and he began to .cquire what he regarded as the trappings of power. He took a flat in Westminster, and c ked a pretty young woman close to the Labour Party to look it over. When she arrived, he said abruptly “I think it’s time I had a mistress.” She turned the offer down. The flat’s new inev 'en' was to be Mrs Sheila Buckley for whom (understandably) several young M.P.s • ■ competing. Stonehouse is not the first nor the last M.P. to keep a mistress; but Sheil” Buckley’s competence and loyalty encouraged him to take on more and more business commitments. It is said that because these were known, even then, to be questionable. Wilson refused to give Stonehouse a portfolio in the 1970 Shadow Cabinet His former Parliamentary Private Secretary at Post and Communications, Bill Molloy — who stood up for him long after his disappearance off Miami —

says: “This made him bitter; he never got over it. He had a lemming-like side to him, suicidal somehow: he behaved pompously and arrogantly in the House, and that is one reason why Harold didn’t give him another job. I think part of what he did, the disappearing act. was because he wanted to say 'I fooled the bloody lot of you’.” Another M.P. says that Wilson was “always wary of Stonehouse since the Pakistani civil war — he pushed the Bangladesh case so hard that no-one trusted him.”

By now Stonehouse was convinced that Wilson was after him. His colleague Bruce Douglas-Mann says: “If he wasn’t going to be P.M. then he’d show that he could succeed in any field — he would come back into politics as a Maxwell figure, the tycoon, the independent M.P. not dependent on the party machine.” Stonehouse has never lived ostentatiously: it was greed for power which accounted for his increased determination to succeed in business, to move from thousands to millions. His main directorships, notably of Global-Imex and the Bangladesh Trust, date from the early seventies. One of his colleagues in Global-Imex . describes the v.ay he behaved: “He saw himself as being the overriding genius. He had a dictatorial nature.”

And, tellingly, “He had an inability to pick the right people. He was a bad picker, and there were some real bums on the boards of his companies ... He was clutching at straws and hoping for a miracle.”

If Stonehouse had one fatal flaw, it was of always knowing best. Before his Old Bailey trial, he said to me: “Nobody in authority in this country thinks things through rationally; everyone is working in compartments with no connection with each other. There’s so much malaise, we're due for fire and brimstone.” It was pretty clear who he thought was the country’s only possible saviour. Perhaps he even believes it still.