IN the summer of 1969 the Postmaster-General in the Labour government of the time - an able, highly regarded politician - came to Glasgow, intending to tour the city’s post office buildings. At one point he accompanied postman William McBride on his round; the politician delivered some letters in Sauchiehall Street (pictured), and jokingly complained about the weight of the bag, which weighed 25lb, some 10lbs lighter than Mr McBride’s ‘normal’ load. The visit went well, and a report of it appeared on the following morning’s Glasgow Herald.
A few years later, the politician would again appear on our - and every other - front page, but for a most startling reason. For this was John Stonehouse, who notoriously faked his own death.
In November 1974 he was reported missing, presumed drowned, off the Miami coast. In reality, he had fled to Australia, where he assumed the identities of two dead men in order to escape the attention of his creditors. In time, he was spotted by Australian police and arrested, and sent back to England. In 1976 he was jailed for seven years after being found guilty on 18 out of 19 charges involving theft and false pretences.
After prison, says his Glasgow Herald obituary of April 1988 (headlined ‘Politician who flew too near the sun’) he tried to reinstate himself as a public person, but it never really succeeded. In 1974 Harold Wilson denied a suggestion by a Czech defector that Stonehouse had been a spy. In 1980, however, it was reported that Stonehouse had indeed been a spy. To quote from a footnote in the first volume of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher, Stonehouse was at the time an agent of the Czech security and intelligence service, the StB.
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