The sickest Establishment cover-up of all
... and, argues a new book, the cynical way the great and the good let Jeremy Thorpe get away with sex abuse gave a green light to monsters like Cyril Smith and Savile
SEX, lies and a murder plot hatched in Westminster. The Thorpe affair was the trial of the century, and — as John Preston’s devastating new book, A Very English Scandal, sets out in forensic detail — subject to a poisonous cover-up that infected nearly every corner of the British Establishment, with monstrous consequences . . .
THE DARKLY handsome but rather disturbed-looking young man strode into the Chelsea police station and announced that he had come to report a serious offence.
He’d had homosexual relations with a prominent politician, which, back then in 1962, was a criminal offence.
And as he was under 21 and a minor at the time, what had taken place was technically rape.
A detective inspector and a sergeant noted down the graphic physical details he gave — when, where (at the accused’s mother’s home in Surrey and in a hotel in Devon), the Vaseline and Kleenex that had been used and how he had bitten the pillow to stop himself screaming out in pain.
He liked the other man, he confessed in a six-page statement, but ‘I hated doing it. I felt sick’.
He handed over love letters from the politician. He was examined by a doctor, who confirmed that penetrative sex had recently taken place. Norman Scott then left the station, and the two police officers sat pondering what to do next.
There was no doubt that what they had heard was evidence of a criminal offence. But the culprit named by Scott was a prominent public figure — no less than the flamboyant and hugely popular Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe, an increasingly impressive figure on the political stage and, then aged 33, clearly destined for greater things.
Should they delve deeper and risk infuriating a man whose friends in high places meant he wielded considerable influence? Or should they wash their hands of the whole business?
Predictably enough — as author John Preston writes in his book A Very English Scandal, a new and scintillating account of the Thorpe affair — ‘self-preservation won the day’.
They made a few cursory inquiries among police in Thorpe’s North Devon constituency, then sent their file to Scotland Yard. From there it was passed on to Special Branch and copied to MI5, which kept files on all MPs.
Despite Thorpe’s homosexuality making him liable to blackmail and therefore a possible security risk, Special Branch also chose to take the path of least resistance.
The file was locked in a safe in the office of an assistant commissioner. The cover-up of the bizarre and criminal antics of Thorpe had begun.
For the next 18 years, Scott continued to complain about how he had been treated by Thorpe — in his view he’d been used and abused, then dumped, denied and denigrated. But no one was prepared to take him seriously. Politicians of all parties, including two prime ministers, knew of the accusations but did nothing.
Or they sat on the knowledge and used it for their own purposes. Harold Wilson read the MI5 file on Thorpe and Scott, and was prepared to leak it to scupper a possible Liberal-Conservative coalition in 1974.
Edward Heath, the Tory leader, knew all about Scott’s allegations too, and it partly influenced his decision to turn down a pact with the Liberals.
AND when Thorpe finally did come to trial for conspiracy to murder his one-time lover, even though his guilt was obvious to most observers, the judge’s summingup whitewashed him to such an extent that a jury found it impossible to convict him.
More than half a century later, the knock-on effect of that scandal is still with us. That Thorpe got away with it may well have encouraged the likes of DJ Jimmy Savile and Liberal MP Cyril Smith — both of whom knew him — to believe that their own sexual exploitation of vulnerable young people would be brushed under the carpet.
A realisation that the Establishment protected its own in cases such as Thorpe’s probably, in turn, fuelled the absurd recent overreaction by police investigating historic abuse accusations by liars and fantasists against the likes of Edward Heath, Leon Brittan and Cliff Richard.
Thorpe, who died 18 months ago, had a lot to answer for.
But it all began with a chance meeting at a country house, at which Thorpe was utterly bowled over. He spotted Scott, who worked as a groom and occasional model, ‘leaning over a stable door’, he revealed to a friend. ‘He was simply heaven.’
But Scott turned out to be a rather pathetic figure — Thorpe called him ‘Poor Bunny’ because of his tendency to cry. He was easy prey for the suave, sly, snazzily dressed Eton and Oxford-educated MP, a man who felt he had a God-given right to get his own way.
Though Thorpe was later to marry, he was an active and promiscuous homosexual — an ‘old queen’, as he confessed in private — who took risks in the arrogant belief that he would never be caught because no one would dare. He was a law unto himself.
For his part, the mentally unstable Scott saw Thorpe as a benefactor and meal-ticket who promised him the earth, then cast him aside. He blamed him for ruining his life, as he would tell anyone who would listen, in pubs, police stations, anywhere.
Pretty soon, everyone in Westminster seemed to know about Thorpe’s indiscretion, but no one blabbed. Instead, they went out of their way to protect him and his secret.
One of the first in the know was fellow Liberal MP Peter Bessell, because Thorpe confided in him about his illicit fling and began to use him as the go-between in increasingly desperate efforts to silence Scott — and in underhand attempts to recover explicit incriminating letters from him.
FOR help, Bessell approached George Thomas, a minister in the Home Office in Harold Wilson’s Sixties government and one of Westminster’s most upright figures, explaining that Thorpe was having a bit of bother with ‘a boy’. (Only after his death did it emerge that Thomas was a closet homosexual and had himself been blackmailed.)
Thomas arranged for Bessell to brief the Home Secretary, Frank Soskice, who, in a nod-and-awink meeting, adhered to what Preston describes as ‘the unwritten code’ that MPs closed ranks if there was any risk of their sexual indiscretions being revealed.
Soskice was sympathetic and seemed to know all about Scott’s allegations anyway from a brown folder on his desk.
‘Tell him to go to hell,’ was his advice. ‘Treat him rough if he makes any demands on Jeremy.’
And don’t worry about a police inquiry. The matter appeared to be resolved, cut off at the very highest level. Thorpe was safe.
He wasn’t, though. His ‘boy’ wouldn’t go away but continued to be a pest, and the potential embarrassment was common knowledge among Liberal MPs even when they elected Thorpe party leader in 1967.
There was a sticky period for Thorpe when Scott poured out his story of betrayal and abuse in person to Liberal Chief Whip David Steel in Westminster.
Steel’s first reaction was to dismiss him as a liar, until Scott brought out letters from a bag and evidence that Thorpe had been paying him money via Bessell. Steel turned white. Could he be telling the truth after all?
Another leading Liberal, Emlyn Hooson, confronted Thorpe, who admitted knowing Scott but insisted nothing sexual had gone on. Hooson was not convinced and convened an official party inquiry to nail the truth.
At this point, Thorpe called on his chum Reginald Maudling, the Conservative Home Secretary. They were both members of an exclusive dining club, the Other Club, which met in the Savoy Hotel. With an endorsement of his probity from Maudling and also from the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Thorpe successfully saw off the inquiry.
Not for the first time, his contacts in high places had bailed him out.
There was a bonus, too, when the police quizzed Scott for ten hours on suspicion of trying to blackmail Thorpe. He was eventually released, more convinced than ever that mysterious dark forces were massed against him. He was right.
Oddly, one key person who remained in ignorance of Thorpe’s secret life was probably Caroline Allpass, the woman he married in a conscious bid to throw off his image as a ‘bachelor’ in the eyes of voters. His marriage, though, increased his anxiety about the damage Scott could still do to him unless he was silenced.
What if Scott took those indiscreet love letters to the newspapers? Thorpe’s career would be over. To Bessell, who was paying small sums of money to Scott on Thorpe’s behalf, he made the alarming proposition that Scott must die. ‘It would be no worse than shooting a sick dog,’ he said.
Lure him to the moors and break his neck, he went on to suggest, demonstrating with a jerk of his elbow how it could be done. Then dispose of the body in the fast-setting concrete of a new motorway or throw it down the shaft of a disused Cornish tin mine.
The plot thickened, as Thorpe harped on increasingly to his small band of close allies about his ‘ultimate solution’. It was an astonishing situation.
Here was one of the country’s top politicians, the leader of his party, actively contemplating murder, yet still those in the know didn’t turn him in, while the growing circle of people who were aware of his proclivities and his predicament chose to protect him with their silence.
The real scandal of the Thorpe debacle is how close he came to fulfilling his wish to bump off Scott. A man was found and hired to do the job for £10,000. In the event, he bungled it. In 1975, Scott was duly lured to what should have been his death on a remote hillside — but his Great Dane dog, Rinka, took the bullet instead and the revolver jammed when it was turned on him.
The extraordinary events exploded all over the newspapers. Now everyone was agog for Scott’s story. Thorpe’s name couldn’t be kept out of it. Surely he was now beyond the help of his Establishment friends?
Indeed, those who had covered up for him in the past were now running scared. Asked by the BBC for an interview about Thorpe, George Thomas, now Speaker of the House of Commons, went into a private meltdown, terrified that the finger of blame would point at him for not having acted when he was approached on Thorpe’s behalf 13 years earlier, and afraid that his own secrets might come out.
But as events escalated, Thorpe still had cards to play and persuaded a chum, the highly regarded editor of the Sunday Times, Harold Evans, of his innocence.
The paper ran an interview with him under the headline ‘The lies of Norman Scott’, in which he denied having slept with Scott. Scandalously, Thorpe deflected all blame for the attempt to kill his former lover on to Bessell, the
sidekick who had loyally done his bidding and protected his back for so many years. Bessell hit back with a front-page story in the Daily Mail, ‘I Told Lies to Protect Thorpe’.
It seemed all up for the now former leader of the Liberal Party when he was charged with conspiracy and incitement to murder, alongside three other defendants who were supposedly involved in the plot, including Bessell.
But even then the Establishment came to Thorpe’s rescue. For this high-profile trial at the Old Bailey in 1979, with the jailing of one of the country’s leading politicians looking a certainty, the most eminent of judges might have been expected to preside. Instead, the unknown Honourable Sir Joseph Donaldson Cantley was selected.
Aged 68 and no intellectual, he was also a crashing snob. He might well favour the suave and upperclass Thorpe. Scott would not be his cup of tea.
So it proved. In his summing up — ‘the most notorious in British legal history’, according to Preston — Cantley hailed Thorpe as ‘a national figure with a very distinguished public record’ while dismissing Scott as ‘a hysterical, warped personality, accomplished sponger and very skilful at exciting and exploiting sympathy. A crook, a fraud, a sponger, a whiner, a parasite.’
HE DESCRIBED Bessell, whose evidence against Thorpe was particularly damning, as ‘a humbug’ and Andrew Newton, the hired hitman who had pointed the gun at Scott, as ‘a buffoon, a perjurer, a chump’.
Another witness was ridiculed as ‘the type of man whose taste ran to a cocktail bar in his living room’.
Finally, the preposterous judge declared the evidence against Thorpe ‘almost entirely circumstantial’ and Scott’s claim to have had an affair with him ‘vindictive’ and motivated by hate.
Did this swing the jury? No one can be sure what goes on in a jury room, but it is known in this case that in an initial straw poll, six were for acquittal and six for conviction. After two days of deliberation, all 12 declared Thorpe not guilty (along with all the other defendants).
So Thorpe was off the hook — saved probably by his pal Frederick Elwyn Jones, the Lord Chancellor, who appointed Cantley to preside over the case. ‘Elwyn Jones was an Establishment stalwart,’ writes Preston, ‘and, it seemed, had done his old friend a favour.’
Norman Scott said afterwards that he always suspected Thorpe would get off, despite the evidence against him. ‘I hoped and prayed he would go to prison because he had done such appalling damage. But somehow I knew the Establishment would look after their own.’
Bessell felt the same, convinced that Thorpe had been protected by an Establishment cover-up. ‘Indisputably’, he said, ‘there was a deliberate cover-up of Jeremy’s relationship with Scott.
Ministers of the Crown, branches of the security services and more than one police force knew about the cover-up and took no action to prevent it.’
Even so, the Establishment that protected Thorpe, turned a blind eye to his depravity and saved him from the humiliation of prison, then took its revenge on him. For the rest of his life, he was an outsider.
With his acquittal, he hoped to resume his career. It didn’t happen. The Queen Mother, whom he adored, snubbed him. In later life, he asked for — and was denied — a peerage.
But that’s the Establishment for you. It never forgives when someone embarrasses it. According to political insider Bernard Donoughue, who was head of the No 10 policy unit in the Seventies, ‘it suited the Establishment for him to be found not guilty. But then he was effectively locked up in a cupboard so he couldn’t say anything.’
It was a kind of justice, after all. But if things had been done properly, those abusers who followed in Thorpe’s footsteps might not have acted with such certainty that they, too, could get away with it.
A Very english Scandal: Sex, Lies And A Murder Plot At The Heart Of The establishment, by John Preston, is published by Viking, £16.99. To order a copy at the special price of £12.74 (offer valid until August 6), call 0844 571 0640 or visit mailbookshop.co.uk. P&P free on orders over £15.