58. John Stonehouse M.P.

Labour MP (Walsall/West Midlands) and former Cabinet Minister John Stonehouse –Convicted and jailed for 7 years (served 3 years) in 1976 for theft, fraud, and deception. His crimes related to a string of fraudulent business ventures and the theft of money from charities. Before his eventual capture by police in Melbourne, Australia, Stonehouse had famously faked his own suicide in 1974 in order to evade justice, and dumped his wife and daughter to shack up with his mistress. In 2006 newly released documents revealed that as a young MP Stonehouse spent ten years as a paid spy for Warsaw Pact communist regimes during the height of the cold war. Had this come to light while he was in office it may well have brought down the Government of Harold Wilson, who was himself rumoured to have been a KGB agent. It would seem that acts of high treason within the Labour Party are not just a phenomenon of the Blair era. http://tinyurl.com/284nse