He is a Higher Rights Advocate (criminal and civil) and a Court and Police Station duty solicitor and a member of the Law Society’s’ Child Panel (having been a member since 1998). As a teenager in the 1970s, current political affairs weren't something I was particularly interested in. Financial pressures and the stress of knowing that he was suspected of being a spy were accompanied by the excessive use of prescription drugs. However, what this book really delves deep into, is the never-seen-before File 40375 from the Czech Secret service archives- that exposes Stonehouse, as yes, a Soviet Spy.

In one way this is a straightforward David and Goliath story, with the defence teams battling the huge pressure brought to bear on the police, the prosecution, the judiciary and the witnesses by those in the very highest positions of power.On 20 November 1974, while booked in at the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami, he told a business colleague that he was going for a late afternoon swim. The author is a lawyer, and so it's perhaps no surprise that a good part of the book is filled with the bureaucratic and political back-and-forth between Australia and the UK (neither of whom really wanted to deal with this unstable trickster) and the legal proceedings.

He was instrumental, along with colleagues from the LCCSA, in arranging the public protest in Parliament Square on 22nd May 2013 and March 2014. In this book, written by John Stonehouse's great-nephew, we hear the familiar story of a man who had everything he needed to succeed, but threw it all away. Julian Hayes, a prolific criminal defence and child care lawyer, has added author to his list of endeavours with his debut novel ‘The Poison Cell’ due to be released on 23rd November 2017. Julian Hayes is a partner at BCL who specialises in corporate and financial crime, surveillance and information data protection law.Julian is also a published author with the book Stonehouse – Cabinet minister, Fraudster, Spy the biography of the politician John Stonehouse a true story of political intrigue, espionage, a disappearance and an Old Bailey trial. While on the surface this may appear to be a simple David and Goliath story with the defence team battling those in the very highest positions of power it is in fact much more, it is an affirmation of the truth, demonstration of the strength of the British judicial process and a celebration of human spirit triumphing in adversity.

She’s also studied the Stonehouse file from the StB archive and says she finds in it nothing to prove that he either took cash from them or provided any information that wasn’t readily available in the public domain. This is that Stonehouse was an avaricious chancer who faked his death in a last-throw attempt to escape a series of failed and fraudulent business dealings in which he had entangled innocent friends and relatives, including the author's father. People who were forced to smile while performing a stressful task experienced a significant reduction in levels of cortisol, the stress hormone.Stonehouse compounded the embarrassment by defiantly turning up at the 1975 party conference in Blackpool, where he sat in seat G30 surrounded by empty chairs.