Fall and Rise

It is not news that John Stonehouse was a Czechoslovak agent. Nor that he was the Labour MP most closely associated with the proto-Thatcherite Institute of Economic Affairs in the days when it was still trying to persuade all three parties, and that he was later briefly the only MP ever to sit in the English separatist interest, before he joined the SDP after having left Parliament and, er, so forth...

The sectarian, sometimes treasonable, Left; the sectarian Right, also treasonable in its relationship with the Rhodesians who purported to depose Her Majesty; and the SDP, with everything that lay behind it, including the direct intervention in the British electoral process of the European Commission, acting as such and on behalf of what has always been its sponsor in Washington: these three streams feed into and define the present Political Class.

But they have been thoroughly mixed into each other for as long as any of them has existed. Alas, the full story will probably never be told. It should be.