the very time that John Stonehouse was running away from his debts, another British celebrity was fleeing from murder – ‘Lucky’ Lucan. An international manhunt for the fugitive peer was underway and the Australian police were on the look-out for him. When they heard about a suspicious Englishman depositing large sums of money at a number of banks, they therefore thought they had found Lucan and placed him under surveillance.
As part of the investigation, a police officer went to search his flat. By astonishing bad luck, the policeman noticed a book of matches on the table in Stonehouse’s home from a hotel where the officer had stayed 20 years earlier – in Miami. He finally put two and two together and realised they, in fact, had John Stonehouse, who wasn’t even missing.
He was arrested on Christmas Eve. Just in case he was Lord Lucan after all, the police made him pull his trousers down, to look for a scar that Lucan had on his thigh. His skin told them it was probably Stonehouse.
After unsuccessful attempts to gain asylum from the mighty powers of Mauritius and Sweden, Stonehouse was deported to Britain, where he technically remained an MP while behind bars in Brixton prison.
Stonehouse was tried on 21 counts of fraud and wasting police time. He conducted his own defence, which must have gone well because he was convicted and sentenced to seven years in Wormwood Scrubs, where he complained about the fact that the radio in the prison workshop only ever played pop music. A few years later, he was released due to ill health, at which point he blamed the press for his downfall, rather than the fact that he had been a spy, adulterer and international criminal.
In 1980, the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, agreed not to prosecute him even though a Czech defector had revealed that Stonehouse had been spying when he was a minister. This was, in a rare stroke of luck for Stonehouse, due to the fact that the previous year Anthony Blunt, formerly of MI5, had been exposed as another member of the Cambridge spy ring, so a minister being outed as a Soviet agent would make it look as if Downing Street was little more than the Kremlin’s London branch.
There was something of a happy ending for Stonehouse when he came out of prison because his wife divorced him and he married his secretary. He died in 1988, by which time he had joined the SDP.
It is often assumed the novel – and later BBC TV comedy series – The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, in which the eponymous hero fakes his own death, was inspired by Stonehouse. In fact, the novel was written before the MP’s exploits but not published until afterwards.
TREADING ON BRAZILIAN TOES – LETTING RONNIE BIGGS OFF THE HOOK, 1974
It seems 1974 was a bad year for the long arm of the British law, but an exciting year for fugitive Britons. For that was the year that a failure to fill out some paperwork allowed Ronnie Biggs, the most famous of the Great Train Robbers, to continue life on the run.
Biggs had dramatically escaped from Wandsworth gaol in 1965 by constructing his own rope ladder, scaling the wall and jumping onto a waiting van. He eventually managed to get to Brazil but hot on his trail was Chief Superintendent Jack ‘Slipper of the Yard’ Slipper.
In 1974, the Daily Express received a tip-off that Biggs was in Rio, and duly informed the Yard. But Slipper slipped up when he chose to disregard protocol and inform neither his own government nor the Brazilians that he was on his way to Rio, because the Brazilian police were about as trustworthy as a convention of snakes and he didn’t want Biggs to be forewarned of the visit.
When Slipper arrived at Copacabana police station, however, it was explained to him with traditional South American manners that he had no jurisdiction and he should leave before they got really upset. Biggs was soon informed of the British policeman’s visit.
Had Slipper simply informed Interpol, they would have picked up Biggs no problem and handed him over to the British authorities. Instead, he was left to his own devices until 2001, when the ageing thief voluntarily returned to Britain to use the NHS, his age having caught up with him more successfully than the police. He remained stubbornly alive until the end of 2013.
THE WRONG MAN – THE SHOOTING OF STEPHEN WALDORF, 1983
The British people don’t expect gun battles on their streets but in 1983 the residents of Kensington, that plushest of London boroughs, witnessed the police gunning down a criminal as he sat in a stationary car. Unfortunately, the man was actually an entirely innocent film editor and the police had made one hell of an error. As the Times reported: ‘It was a trail of mistakes and coincidences that went terribly wrong.’
The police were after one David Martin, an armed robber suspected of shooting a police officer. Martin had escaped from a crown court cell the previous month and the police wanted him back. They therefore had his girlfriend, Sue Stephens, under surveillance in case he made contact.
A poster was distributed to local police stations warning Martin should be considered armed and highly dangerous, and a number of officers on the 21-strong team put together to hunt him down were issued with firearms. They were informed that Martin had a ‘pathological hatred for authority, particularly directed towards police officers, even more particularly for those officers who had arrested and dealt with him’. It was an understandable warning, but one primed, perhaps, to make any officer coming across Martin very twitchy.
One of the officers on edge was Detective Constable Peter Finch. He had arrested Martin in September 1982 after a violent struggle in Martin’s flat, when Martin, bizarrely disguised as a woman, had threatened Finch with two guns, shouting: ‘I will have you! I will blow you away!’ In the course of the fight, Martin was shot in the neck by another officer and, as a result, he was set to explode.
On 14 January 1983 Finch and another officer, Detective Constable John Jardine, were issued with .38 Smith and Wesson revolvers. They were both qualified to carry them, but neither had ever drawn a gun in anger – it was very rare for British police to even draw their weapons, let alone fire them. In the previous three years, fewer than 50 bullets had been fired by officers, with just six people being hit.
Finch and Jardine were issued with the guns as part of the police unit following Sue Stephens, a unit that also included a black cab, a motorbike and a number of cars, which tailed her from her flat in Kilburn to the home of her friend Lester Purdy, who had arranged to meet Stephen Waldorf to talk about a film job. The three of them met at a car hire shop in west London. It was bad luck for Waldorf that, with his long blond hair and long nose, he looked a lot like David Martin.
The three subsequently drove away in a yellow mini, with Waldorf in the passenger seat and Stephens in the back. As they followed, the police thought it might be Martin, but wanted a positive identification before taking any action. One of the officers reported on his radio: ‘It is looking good, it may be our target. We can see his large nose, his hair. It is looking good.’
When the mini stopped at traffic lights, the officer in charge of the operation, Superintendent George Ness, decided to send an officer on foot to walk past the car in an attempt to identify Martin. Finch knew him best, so he was sent to creep up to the car and identify the suspect. He later testified that he was ‘100 per cent sure it was Martin’.
‘I was looking through the glass and saw a three-quarter profile of Martin. I saw his large nose, his hair and even his high cheekbones,’ he said.
Finch drew his weapon and shot out the tyres of the car. Then he fired four bullets through the window at Martin.
Finch’s colleagues saw what they believed was
