Member of Parliament and suspected spy John Stonehouse resigns from the Labour Party (UK) after being arrested for faking his own death.
John Thomson Stonehouse (28 July 1925 – 14 April 1988) was a British Labour and Co-operative Party politician and cabinet minister under Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Stonehouse is remembered for his unsuccessful attempt at faking his own death in 1974, a scheme uncovered after a claim that Stonehouse was recently-disappeared murder suspect Lord Lucan.
More than twenty years after his death, it was publicly revealed that he had been an agent for the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic military intelligence. In 1979, the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and top cabinet members learned from a Czech defector that Stonehouse had been a paid Czechoslovak spy since 1962. He had provided secrets about government plans as well as technical information about aircraft, and received about £5,000. He was already in prison for fraud and the government decided there was insufficient evidence to bring him to trial, so no announcement or prosecution was made.