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The Spy Who Died Twice, review: sordid, salacious and oddly nostalgic
The story of John Stonehouse, the MP who faked his own death, was like gold dust for the British tabloid press

Watching The Spy Who Died Twice (Channel 4) made me feel rather nostalgic. Not for MPs who fake their own death on a Miami beach and move to Australia – although we could do with a few comic escapades to lighten the political mood – but for the chat show.

Towards the end of this film, which retold the story of John Stonehouse, there was a clip of Stonehouse being interviewed by Russell Harty. Along with Michael Parkinson and Terry Wogan, Harty spoke to the most interesting people of the day, and millions of us tuned in. But what do we have now? Either political programmes or the showbiz fluff of Graham Norton or The One Show. It’s a great shame, although perhaps there is no presenter with the skill to carry it off these days.

Anyway, back to Stonehouse. The film was a rehash of his story, with no great revelations other than the claim – backed by documents from the Czech intelligence archives –  that he was a spy, but everyone thought that anyway. It was a fun tale, though, both for those who remember it and those too young to have heard his name.

Stonehouse was once tipped as a future Prime Minister, a “charismatic maverick” who rose quickly through the ranks. But he amassed business debts and was in the pay of the Czechs. One or both of these predicaments pushed him to fake a drowning and assume a new identity, stolen from one of his constituents (he had been inspired by Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal).

It turned out that Stonehouse was having an affair with his secretary, Sheila Buckley. Both she and his wife Barbara spoke to journalists and appeared on television, lending a soap opera quality to proceedings. Someone in the documentary sniffily said this was “tabloid heaven”, while barrister Geoffrey Robertson said Sheila’s appearance in the story “appealed to the sexism of the Seventies”, but really it appealed to all of us. We didn’t even have to imagine Stonehouse’s call to his wife from a Melbourne police station after being arrested, because we could listen to the recording: “Hello, darling… I’ve been deceiving you. I’m sorry about that.”