SEX, LIES AND A ‘LOST’ VIDEOTAPE

Almost 40 years after he was ordered to destroy it, Tom Mangold’s film exposing a conspiracy to protect Thorpe will finally be aired

Just after 9am on Friday 20 July, 1979, the BBC dispatch rider strode up the drive of my Chiswick home and handed me a letter marked Personal/Private and Urgent. It came from the editor of BBC Television News advising me that I was forbidden to show my copy of the background film to Jeremy Thorpe’s trial for conspiracy to murder, to anyone; ‘the Director General himself seeks your personal assurance’. In a later phone call, I was ordered to destroy my copy. ‘That film is libellous,’ the note’s author warned me.

Well, one doesn’t burn books or destroy documentary films. Not in my house anyway.

The BBC film, for which I was the reporter, was an investigation into Thorpe’s relationship with his lover Norman Scott; how Thorpe plotted to have him murdered; and how elements in the British establishment had participated in an attempt to cover up Thorpe’s crimes.

Thorpe was the first British TV celebrity politician and became Liberal Party leader in 1967. He was also a secret homosexual. His infamous plan to have the troublesome Scott killed led to him and three associates being charged with conspiracy to murder.

Before his trial, BBC TV’S Panorama had prepared a one-hour investigation into the affair, concentrating on the cover-up. When Thorpe and his codefendants were found not guilty on Friday 22 June 1979, the film we made could not be shown for legal reasons. But I thought it should be preserved. For years the VHS copy sat on the top shelf of my study. A few years ago I converted it to disc. Seeing it reminded me it was a remarkable snapshot of 70’s Britain. When we learned the BBC was planning a three-part drama about the Thorpe affair, my producer Steve Anderson suggested we show our film. When we approached today’s more enlightened BBC bosses they were delighted it had survived

– so now, at last, after an almost 40-year wait, we will be showing

The Lost Panorama, on BBC4.

The fight to make this documentary took much time and stealth by our tiny production team. We received hostile calls from outsiders including Jo Grimond, who was Liberal Party leader before Thorpe and briefly again in 1976 when Thorpe resigned. Grimond said he’d have me sacked if I didn’t stop working on the film. And much of my research material was covertly handed over to the Security Services by their man in the BBC. It was only the cunning of our producer that kept the film alive.

We gasped as the material flowed in. My chance meeting in the Bahamas with Sir Ranulph Bacon, former Dep- uty Assistant Commissioner Crime of the Metropolitan Police, led to him revealing the steps taken by police to ‘lose’ Thorpe’s files. Former bomb squad hero Bob Huntley told me how Scott’s attempts to launch an investigation into his illegal sexual relationship with Thorpe failed.

And Thorpe’s close friend, Liberal MP Peter Bessell, frankly revealed to me how he operated at Home Office level to organise the cover-up to protect Thorpe. We called the film Jeremy Thorpe – The Other Conspiracy because it was more concerned with the political cover-up than the murder plot. That is the real scandal. And it isn’t over yet. I’ve uncovered evidence which, if proven, points to the successful attempt by someone at the highest political level to silence a key witness against Thorpe, whose evidence would have certainly led to Thorpe’s conviction. That man is Dennis Meighan, a south London villain and antique firearms collector. Years ago, I was in Chiswick Park when Meighan called out to me and we spoke about the Thorpe affair. He revealed he was offered £13,500 to murder Scott ‘who was a nuisance to the Liberal Party’. According to him, Thorpe had asked his friend David Holmes to organise a final solution. Holmes found Meighan through a dodgy contact, Andrew Newton (who has now changed his name – it’s unknown whether he’s still alive). Meighan says he, Newton and Thorpe’s representative met in the sleazy Ritz Cafe in Shepherd’s Bush in 1975, where a contract to kill was agreed.

Meighan says he travelled to Barnstaple to murder Scott, but bottled out, returned to London and gave his gun to Newton. In October 1975, Newton went to Exmoor to kill Scott – but only managed to kill his Great Dane Rinka, who was in the car with them, before the gun jammed. Newton was charged over the shooting and Newton in turn, says Meighan, ‘grassed me up as the owner of the gun’. Meighan says officers came to his Chiswick home and, in the kitchen, he made a statement revealing the whole plot. He was warned he may be ‘done’ for illegally possessing a firearm. If true, his statement to them was a time bomb, evidence Thorpe had offered the equivalent today of £134,000 to have his former lover murdered. So what happened to this dynamite statement?

Meighan said that a little while later he received an anonymous phone call, inviting him to go to his local police station. There, he was given a new statement written for him and awaiting his signature. ‘It was good news for me and Thorpe,’ he said. ‘Thorpe’s name and the Ritz meeting were gone, but so was my involvement with the gun. I couldn’t wait to sign.’

Meighan’s claims were recently investigated by an independent police force, who were poised to bring charges against two people, but the Crown Prosecution Service declined to take it any further. If true, Meighan’s story amounts to astonishing interference with a police document, which could only have been ordered at the highest level.

So why was it so important to protect Thorpe? My guess is the US intelligence services were exerting pressure on Whitehall to prevent another scandal. The Cambridge spies fiasco in the 50s and 60s, when Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to the Soviet Union, had severely bruised Anglo-American intelligence sharing, and the Profumo affair was fresh in the public’s memory. The last thing the British needed was a problem with a politician who came close to a top job in Ted Heath’s aborted attempt at a coalition government.

Proof of this came last month with the release of secret documents in Washington. One, from the FBI in 1963, revealed Thorpe had picked up a rent boy in San Francisco and sent him an incriminating letter. The rent boy had given this to the FBI and it was passed to MI5. However, Robert Kennedy, then-US Attorney General, intervened as he wanted the British to be informed at a very high level as they ‘can’t afford another disclosure of this kind’.

There are so many questions about the Thorpe affair that have never been answered. I hope that now this film is being aired, they finally might be.

Tom Mangold’s updated version of Jeremy Thorpe – The Other Conspiracy will be on BBC4 in June.

Jeremy Thorpe had protection at the highest levels. Below left: his lover Norman Scott