MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Stonehouse: Cabinet Minister, Fraudster, Spy
Labour Party high-flier's downfall a bathetic tale of misjudgement and greed
PRIDE BEFORE FALL: John Stonehouse (on the right) with the Queen at the opening of the National Postal Museum
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
FROM humble beginnings, John Stonehouse became a rising star in the Labour Party and a cabinet minister in Harold Wilson’s 1964 government, only to be brought crashing down as a result of his own hubris.
His working-class family, active in the Co-operative movement, were staunch socialists and their eldest son John also became a Co-operative activist. After a short spell in the RAF during the war, he gained a degree in economics and politics at LSE.
In 1957, aged 32, he became MP for Wednesbury, the youngest MP at the time and in 1968 was appointed postmaster general and joined Wilson’s cabinet. A tall and personable man, he was well- liked and respected in the Labour Party and, with his soft-left politics, was seen by a number of pundits as a potential prime minister.
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