A VERY ENGLISH FARCE!
After insisting for years he was dead, police turn up on Jeremy Thorpe hitman’s doorstep – to find he’s vanished . . .
THE investigation into one of Britain’s most notorious political scandals descended into total farce last night.
In an astonishing turn of events, police were first forced to admit that the prime suspect in the plot to kill Jeremy Thorpe’s gay ex-lover is actually still alive.
Then, when embarrassed officers raced to Andrew Newton’s Surrey home to confront him yesterday, they found he had vanished, leaving the humiliated force empty-handed. The developments raise the prospect of a fresh prosecution in the 40-year-old case. Ex-Liberal leader Thorpe was acquitted in 1979 of plotting to kill his former lover, Norman Scott. Millions have been gripped by the BBC’s account of the affair, A Very English Scandal, starring Hugh Grant, which ended last night.
THE caller, claiming to be someone to do with the Liberal Party, sported a decidedly theatrical Scots accent.
Too theatrical for Jack Hurley, canny editor of the West Somerset Free Press, who recognised the man on the other end of the phone as someone he had interviewed on numerous occasions in his capacity a local MP – not to mention leader of the Liberal Party.
‘I think you are Jeremy Thorpe,’ challenged the local journalist.
The ensuing pause was followed by embarrassed bluster, evolving in an instant from ‘North o’ the Border’ to cut-glass Etonian.
‘The person stalled a bit, then he admitted who he was,’ Mr Hurley later recounted. ‘He said he desperately wanted to keep the story out of the paper.’
That ‘story’ was undoubtedly the most sensational ever broken by Mr Hurley’s newspaper: an off-duty AA patrolman called Ted Lethaby had been driving across Exmoor with his wife and another couple when out of the foggy night emerged a man standing in the road, covered in blood and hugging a dead dog, a Great Dane.
‘My dog has been shot – and all because of a book I wrote about Jeremy Thorpe,’ the man told Mr Lethaby. He was Norman Scott, Thorpe’s gay ex-lover, and the dog, felled by a single shot, was Rinka.
It was October 1975 and the beginning of a scandal that would destroy Thorpe’s career and culminate four years later in his trial at the Old Bailey on charges of procuring a murder and conspiracy to murder – the socalled ‘trial of the century’ – in which he would be sensationally acquitted.
It was that courtroom drama retold last night on BBC1 in the concluding episode of A Very English Scandal, starring Hugh Grant as Thorpe and Ben Whishaw as Scott.
The series has rekindled huge interest in a story that has never quite gone away, despite Thorpe’s longago descent into political obscurity, and death in 2014 at the age of 85.
That cod- Scotsman phone call made by the stylish, patrician Liberal leader and aspiring Westminster powerbroker as he struggled desperately and clumsily to contain a crisis that would soon overwhelm him sums up ‘Rinkagate’, as the affair became known: sordid, sinister but also darkly comic.
The whiff of Establishment coverup has always hung heavily over the scandal, with the suspicion that Thorpe (Eton and Oxford) who was twice-married and had a young son, Rupert, was saved from prison by friends in high places.
Indeed, a BBC Panorama investigation in 1979 alleging that MI5 and the Metropolitan Police were aware from the early 1960s of Thorpe’s status as a security risk due to his homosexuality – then illegal – was shelved by the Corporation and was shown for the first time only last night.
And now Rinkagate has received fresh impetus, with the disclosure that a cold-case investigation into the affair ordered in 2016 – triggered by a new witness coming forward – has been botched spectacularly by the police force undertaking it.
Gwent Police called off their inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the shooting after concluding that Andrew ‘Gino’ Newton, the man who shot Rinka (and who may have intended to kill Scott before his gun jammed) was dead, and therefore unable to shed fresh light on events. Except, as the Mail reports today, that Mr Newton – now glorying in the not exactly forgettable pseudonym of Hann Redwin – is in fact very much alive and kicking, living in plain sight in the Surrey commuter town of Dorking. Or at least he was, until he vanished at the weekend following the discovery by journalists that he wasn’t dead.
References to Hann Redwin abound on the internet, including articles from 1994 reporting the inquest into the death of his then partner Caroline Mayorcas, who fell 900ft to her death while climbing the Eiger with Mr Redwin/Newton. The coroner concluded there was no evidence of foul play.
The detective work required to establish such facts (ie a quick search on Google) appears to have outstripped the capabilities of the Gwent force, which, now thoroughly humiliated, is having to exhume a case it considered buried.
MR Newton’s resurrection follows the claim by a London antique gun dealer and sometime criminal called Dennis Meighan that he was promised the equivalent of £140,000 in today’s money (pilfered from Liberal Party funds by Thorpe, it is said) to kill Scott.
The offer was allegedly made during a meeting in west London by the late David Holmes, Thorpe’s closest friend and an assistant treasurer of the Liberal Party. Also said to be present was Mr Newton, a professional pilot and friend of Meighan, who had selected him for the job.
Meighan claims that after travelling to Devon to shoot Scott he ‘bottled’ the hit, fearing locals in the pub where Scott was staying would remember him because of his London accent.
He says he returned to London and handed over the re-activated Mauser pistol he intended to use in the murder to Mr Newton.
Angry that he was now having to deal with Scott, Mr Newton nevertheless accepted the role and proceeded to befriend his target by claiming he had been sent to protect him from shadowy forces seeking to silence him. It was while driving Scott across the lonely
wilds of Exmoor that Newton seized his opportunity, stopping the car and drawing his pistol. Scared of the dog, he shot Rinka, before – according to Scott – pointing the gun at his intended victim, only for it to jam. Panicking, Newton drove off, leaving the terrified and distressed Scott to be discovered by Mr Lethaby.
Newton was subsequently jailed for two years for possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life but escaped a charge of attempted murder. He gave evidence against Thorpe at the latter’s trial in 1979.
Writing in the Sunday Times yesterday, former Panorama reporter Tom Mangold described how he ‘bumped’ into to Meighan while his walking his dog in a West London park in 2015. Meighan, who appeared to know who Mr Mangold was, then related his extraordinary account of his alleged involvement in the conspiracy.
He claimed to have confessed to his role in the Seventies but following a meeting with three unidentified police officers, he was presented with a redacted statement to sign that absolved him from any involvement and which omitted any mention of Jeremy Thorpe. Tom Mangold says he is in no doubt that Thorpe benefitted from the scales of justice being tilted in his favour.
His documentary shows that MI5 maintained ‘copious files’ on Thorpe and the Met hid its own files on the Liberal leader in a senior officer’s private safe.
Scott, now 78 and living in the West Country, is critical of Gwent’s failure to pursue the cold- case inquiry, saying the force effectively did nothing to uncover the full truth behind what he regards as an attempt on his life.
He now claims to have been not only exploited by Thorpe but raped. Describing himself as a naive and virginal 19-year- old at the time of their meeting in 1960, he has said: ‘Jeremy Thorpe raped me and put his hand over my mouth. I was a virgin. I’d had girlfriends, I didn’t know what gay sex was. Jeremy Thorpe took advantage of me in every way a human being could. I was bowled over by his generosity. I didn’t know then he was grooming me.’
Until his death Thorpe, who went on to marry twice, maintained that his relationship with Scott had been merely one of affectionate friendship, and not physical.
Scott’s attempts to publicise what he regarded as his unjust treatment by Thorpe fell largely on deaf ears – by design or otherwise. MI5 had been tipped off by the FBI about a homosexual encounter involving Thorpe during a visit to the United States but the Security Service appeared curiously reluctant to delve into the implications of Thorpe’s secret life, and his potential as a target for blackmail.
BROUGHT to trial with three alleged accomplices, Thorpe adopted a strangely confident approach to the trial. Having resigned as Liberal leader, and lost his seat in the 1979 general election, he nevertheless believed in some kind of political rehabilitation.
He was aided in his fight by two men: his oxford contemporary and defence counsel George Carman, and the trial judge, Mr Justice Cantley, whose summing up must rank as one of the most biased in English legal history.
Addressing the jury, he said: ‘I now turn to the evidence of Mr Norman Scott. You will remember him well. A hysterical, warped personality, accomplished sponger and very skilful at exciting and exploiting sympathy. He is a crook. He is a fraud. He is a sponger. He is a whiner. He is a parasite.’
Not surprisingly, Thorpe and his co-defendants were acquitted. But his hoped-for rehabilitation never came. He had become an embarrassment to his party and was largely shunned by its leadership.
He ended his life wracked by Parkinson’s disease, musing on what might have been in his rural home, comforted by the loyalty of his second wife Marion, the former Countess of Harewood, until her death nine months before his own.
Thorpe’s first wife, Caroline, whom he married in 1968, died in a road accident ten days after the 1970 general election.
Norman Scott refuses to forget or forgive. Surviving on a tiny state pension, he blames Thorpe for the majority of his woes – his suave, patrician nemesis.
‘Thorpe may have died but even now, from beyond the grave, he’s still trying to own a part of my life,’ he said. ‘After Exmoor, I wasn’t sure I’d survive, much less thrive, but I have. Jeremy Thorpe took my twenties and thirties away from me and tried to take my life. I won’t let him take any more.’
And he added: ‘If the papers ever say, “Norman Scott has killed himself”, it’ll be a lie. I wouldn’t, and I won’t.’
More than 40 years after that dark wet night on Exmoor, the ghost of Rinka is still with us – but now, at last, the full story and the extent of that audacious cover-up may be about to emerge.