25th October 2021

███████████

Editorial Legal Director

Hachette UK Limited

Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ

Dear ███████

Re: Julian Hayes – ‘Stonehouse Cabinet Minister, Fraudster, Spy’

Committee and Cabinet ‘Minutes‘ and ‘Meetings’

“There are also typed letters, reports and minutes of committee and Cabinet meetings.”

(‘Minister for Monstrous Deception - The John Stonehouse story told by his great-nephew

 Julian Hayes’, Daily Mail 16 July 2021, and online today and for evermore.)

When I wrote to you on 20 October Re. ‘Cabinet Minister’?, I said I would be returning to the following quote, which I do now, although I must tell you that I shall have to write about it further. Today I just want to address the portion underlined. The quote is part of a larger quote on page 28, another portion of which I referred to in my letter to you of 12 October, page 5.

Hayes writes: “In addition are a number of typed letters, reports and minutes of committee and cabinet meetings, for example, a detailed description of a Labour shadow cabinet meeting in 1963 concerning the issue of nuclear disarmament and another on the Monckton Commission.” 

As I wrote to you on 20 October, my father was never a member of either the Labour Party (LP) shadow cabinet or LP government cabinet and below I provide the links for you to establish the details with regard to shadow cabinets during the time frame of these documents. These cabinets had 12 elected members in addition to the Leader, Deputy Leader, Labour Chief Whip, Labour Leader in the House of Lords, and Labour Whip in the House of Lords. Of course, the membership of LP government cabinets are likewise easy to find online.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1963_Labour_Party_Shadow_Cabinet_election

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1962_Labour_Party_Shadow_Cabinet_election

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Labour_Party_Shadow_Cabinet_election

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_Labour_Party_Shadow_Cabinet_election

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1959_Labour_Party_Shadow_Cabinet_election

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Labour_Party_Shadow_Cabinet_election

I attach to this letter two documents from the StB file: 

• Minutes: StB reference 43075_000_0293 and 0295 (0294 is blank, being the reverse of 0293)
• Monckton Commission nominees: 43075_43075_020_009/11/13/15/17/19/21/23

The wording of the quote above leads the reader into believing that the StB file contains a number of “minutes of committee and cabinet meetings, for example …” when in fact the file contains precisely one document that records minutes of a meeting. It is two-pages, and is attached as Document A). 

As you can see, speakers at this meeting, which could well have been attended by others, are Mr D. Healey, Mr A. Henderson, Mr. F. Bellenger, Mr. K. Zilliacus, Mr F. Allaun, Mr R. Crossman, Sir L. Ungoed-Thomas, Mr Gaitskell, Mr. E. Shinwell, Dr. B. Stross, Mr. J. Stonehouse, Mr A. Woodburn, and Mr G. Brown. The document is not dated but appears in the StB file between two documents dated 11 October 1960. Hayes must have his own reason for saying this document is from 1963 – and I would like to know from him what leads him to write that.

Of the persons named in this document, the following were in the LP shadow cabinet in 1960: Hugh Gaitskell (Leader); George Brown (Deputy Leader); and Denis Healey. Speakers who were not in the cabinet at the time were Mr A. Henderson, Mr. F. Bellenger, Mr. K. Zilliacus, Mr F. Allaun, Mr R. Crossman, Sir L. Ungoed-Thomas, Mr. E. Shinwell, Dr. B. Stross, Mr. J. Stonehouse, and Mr A. Woodburn. If one takes Hayes’ dubious date of 1963, George Brown and Denis Healey would have been the only cabinet members attending. What this information shows is that these minutes did not come from a LP shadow cabinet meeting.

Therefore, when Hayes writes “a detailed description of a Labour shadow cabinet meeting in 1963 concerning the issue of nuclear disarmament” he is stating a falsehood. There are no minutes from Labour shadow cabinet meetings in the StB file. 

There is nothing to indicate these minutes were given to the StB by my father. They could have come from anyone in the Labour Party at the time and there are two candidates even among the speakers: Barnett Stross who, without any evidence, Josef Frolik accused of being an StB agent, codenamed ‘Gustav’; and the more likely contender, Konni Zilliacus, who is mentioned quite a few times in the StB file and was expelled from the LP in 1949 for having communist sympathies but was readmitted in 1952 and became an MP again in 1955. 

To push the notion of plural “minutes of committee and cabinet meetings”, Hayes has linked in the Monckton papers at the end by writing “and another”: “reports and minutes of committee and cabinet meetings, for example, a detailed description of a Labour shadow cabinet meeting in 1963 concerning the issue of nuclear disarmament and another on the Monckton Commission.”

I attach to this letter the 8-page Monckton document B), to which Hayes refers. As you can see, it relates to the terms of reference announced by the Prime Minister on 21 July 1959 and the proposed membership, on which there was widespread consultation and coverage in the press. There was never any secrecy about the membership of the Monckton Commission, on the contrary, it was very much a matter of public debate in 1959-1960, both in the UK and Africa. On page 3 you can see a list of twelve ‘United Kingdom Government Nominees’. When the composition of the Commission was finally agreed later that year, four of those names became UK representatives, in addition to the Chairman Lord Monckton himself, two became Commonwealth representatives, and six did not make it onto the final list. On 24 November 1959 the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, announced the names of the membership of the Monckton commission in the House of Commons. There is nothing to indicate this document originated with my father. Each page has the House of Commons crest imprinted at the top left and, because of the formal language used and content, I believe it is an official document generated by the LP leadership for the information of, and circulation to, all LP MPs. 

On page 29, Hayes reports the StB account of the handing over of this document at Charing Cross station on 3 June 1960. He doesn’t question why this document relating to nominee names that were discussed widely on two continents after 21 July 1959, with the final list confirmed by the PM on 24 November 1959, would be of any particular interest to the Czechs in June 1960, and subject to such subterfuge: “The meeting took place as a random meeting, when we walked around the corner of the station into a narrow street where no one was, Kolon placed an envelope in my newspaper that I had under my arm and continued my journey. The duration of the meeting is about 3 minutes. The report contains a description of Monckton’s mission and provides a background date on its members.” 

Although Hayes never references anything, this is in fact from StB document 43075_43075_000_0217 and it begins by saying the meeting was monitored by a Mr. Hladky. This whole alleged scenario is reminiscent of the 1964 film ‘Carry on Spying’ and if Hayes can’t see how ridiculous it all is I can only suggest that he spends some time in the Czech Republic and Slovakia to educate himself in the ways of the former communist secret services. In Josef Frolik’s memoirs, page 10, he says that his comrades used to joke that ‘One half of Czechoslovakia is spying on the other half!’ and that was confirmed when communist rule ended in 1989, and it was revealed that the StB kept enough secret files on the citizenship to cover several football fields, piled metres high. Does Hayes think all those reports were accurate renditions of events or does he think my father’s file deserves ‘special consideration’?

I now request that Julian Hayes rewrite the section quoted at the beginning of this letter to accurately reflect the facts, which are verifiable, that I have outlined in this letter. 

Yours sincerely,

Julia Stonehouse