Thorpe DID send a hitman to kill me... and they are STILL covering it up
I’ve asked myself many times: why am I still alive? Some powerful people wanted me dead. Even now I can’t bear to see guns on TV... it takes me straight back to the night on the moors when they killed my dog and tried to kill me.
EARLY last year, a man call ed Norman Scott was asked to recount to detectives his role in one of the 20th Century’s greatest political scandals. What poured forth over four days was a twisting story involving an illicit affair, secret letters, blackmail claims, a botched assassination attempt on a lonely moor, a shabby cover-up and, finally, a fall from grace unparalleled in Westminster.
The man who fell was the former Li beral Party l eader Jeremy Thorpe, who went on trial accused of conspiracy to murder Scott, a part-time model who had once been his lover – at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Britain.
Despite his acquittal, Thorpe’s glittering career was over. When the scandal exploded in the 1970s, everyone knew the name Norman Scott, but as time passed, it faded from public consciousness.
Then, last year, detectives from Gwent Police set up Operation Velum to investigate new claims that vital evidence had been suppressed before the trial – and turned to Scott for help.
In a rare interview – his most candid yet and his first for more than 20 years – Scott, now 77, today reveals that police were poised earlier this year to bring charges against two men, one a former detective. However, two weeks ago he received a letter from the Crown
‘I was disgusted when I got the CPS letter’
Prosecution Service telling him it had decided to drop the case. ‘Had this new evidence not been suppressed at the time, then the trial verdict might well have been different,’ says Scott.
‘But here they are telling me they can’t do anything about it. I can’t help feeling this new inquiry has ended with yet another cover-up.’
In a separate development, The Mail on Sunday can also reveal that newly released Cabinet Office papers show how Thorpe desperately tried to smear Scott as the scandal was about to break.
In 1976, three months before he resigned his party’s leadership, he wrote to the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and falsely claimed Scott was at the centre of ‘some sort of vice ring’ run by one of Scott’s friends, Jack Levy, an advertising art director who has since died. The claims were said to involve a sunken bath at Levy’s Georgian home ‘which could take six people’.
Nothing came of his strange allegation, which both Scott and Levy’s widow Stella, a former model, were unaware of until last week. Both deny the allegations.
Ultimately, of course, Thorpe failed to stop details of his own relationship with Scott, whom he affectionately called Bunnies – ‘because he said I reminded him of a frightened rabbit’ – becoming public three years later in court.
The trial of the century, as it was called, held the nation spellbound, with Thorpe accused of wanting to silence Scott, whom he believed was hellbent on ruining him.
Even the prosecution called it a ‘tragedy of truly Greek and Shakespearean proportions’.
‘It was hideous,’ recalls Scott. ‘But I was staying in the West End with Stella and Jack throughout the trial and we had a lovely time going to nightclubs every evening and having a bop. It sounds awful but I had to do something to unwind.’
Scott was vilified by the judge, who, in a summing up farcically one- sided in favour of Thorpe, called him a ‘liar, fraud, a sponger, a whiner and a parasite’.
Little wonder then that the experience left Scott feeling it had been he, and not the well-connected politician, who had been on trial. He has lived quietly in Devon ever since – at least until Operation Velum detectives arrived at his home on the edge of Dartmoor last year, asking him to revisit his past.
Police told Scott that an antique firearms dealer, Dennis Meighan, had confessed to being hired by a ‘representative’ of Thorpe in 1975 to kill Scott to protect the politician from public humiliation.
Meighan agreed to carry out the murder – in exchange for £13,500 (£140,000 today) – but later changed his mind. Although he was arrested at the time and made a confession, his statement was destroyed and a few weeks later he was made to sign another. This one exonerated both himself and Thorpe.
Meighan couldn’t believe his luck. A few days later he received an anonymous phone call warning him to keep his mouth shut.
But over the years the secret weighed heavily upon him and he eventually revealed the truth to the BBC’s Tom Mangold and, later, a Mail on Sunday reporter.
It was, it seemed, confirmation of the long-suspected existence of an invisible shield protecting Thorpe. ‘It was chilling to hear Meighan was willing to kill me,’ says Scott. ‘I didn’t know him but I went over everything again with the police. At times it was hard because I have blocked things from my memory.’
And he reveals he can no longer stand seeing guns on television: ‘I can’t bear it – it reminds me of the time they tried to kill me.’
He is alluding to the night of October 23, 1975, when, on a deserted stretch of road on Exmoor, a parttime pilot, Andrew Newton, shot dead Scott’s dog, a Great Dane called Rinka. Newton then pressed the pistol to Scott’s temple, saying:
‘It’s your turn now.’ But, as Scott heard the hammer click, the gun jammed and Newton then sped away in his yellow Mazda car.
Ten minutes later, covered in Rinka’s blood, Scott flagged down a car and dramatically blurted out ‘Jeremy Thorpe’ to the driver.
‘What I remember most clearly now all these years on is being in the hospital afterwards and holding poor Rinka’s chain so tightly that it cut into my hand,’ says Scott. ‘I’ve asked myself many times, “Why am I still alive?” Some powerful people wanted me dead.’ Newton, later convicted of possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life, agreed to the assignment when Meighan, an old school friend, turned it down. Meighan’s involvement only came to light after Thorpe’s death two years ago.
Now 69, he would have been willing to help Operation Velum detectives – but only if he was guaranteed immunity from prosecution.
Who could blame him? After all, he tried to do the right thing by confessing in 1975 – only to be muzzled by dark forces. And police did indeed plan to prosecute him – for conspiracy to murder – and made their intentions clear to Scott. They also sent the CPS a file on a senior detective whose name was on Meighan’s false statement.
‘This was as close as they got to the cover-up,’ says Scott. A letter to Scott from a senior CPS prosecutor
‘I’ve tried to block things from my memory’
said: ‘Police have passed the file to me to consider the possibility of bringing charges against either two. [Meighan and the detective].’
But she added that there was ‘insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of prosecution’. Meighan had ‘exercised his right to silence’ when interviewed under caution by police and the detective who ‘appeared to have witnessed’ Meighan’s false 1975 statement could not recall him.
The prosecutor added that even if Meighan’s statement was proved to be false there was no evidence to show the detective ‘was there when it was signed or was responsible for putting his name on it’.
What Scott found more surprising was the letter’s assertion that ‘as one might expect, the original case papers relating to the [Thorpe] trial are no longer available’.
‘ There must be court records. They can’t be gone: it was supposed to be the trial of the century,’ he says. ‘I was so disgusted when I got the CPS letter. The police were very confident they had a case,
which is why the decision is rather puzzling. I suppose that’s it now.’
Scott, a keen horseman throughout his life, was just 21 and working in Oxfordshire for Norman van de Vater, a well-known figure in the equestrian world, when he first met Thorpe, 11 years his senior.
Scott says: ‘I thought he [Thorpe] was amazing. You didn’t see people like that very often, not in the 1960s, and I was very naive. It was his charisma, his wonderful voice, his way. That’s how it evolved.’
For a time, Thorpe was the country’s most popular politician.
He was a brilliant orator and sparkled with a panache that, says Scott, renders today’s politicians monochrome in comparison.
‘I’d watch him from the Strangers’ Gallery in the Commons and feel so proud,’ he says, before quickly adding: ‘But I hated it all really. And he did treat me so very badly.’
Even so, a picture of Thorpe, with Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, laying wreaths at the Cenotaph, hangs on the wall of his bathroom.
For a while, he and Thorpe lived together in a flat in Westminster. Scott says of this period in the early 1960s: ‘He was always bringing these dreadful types back, Swedish sailors as I recall, from his friend’s pub on the Isle of Dogs. But I wanted nothing to do with it.
‘So I’d go off and walk my dog, a Jack Russell, in Green Park. One night I went off in one of Jeremy’s coats and he tried to pick me up, not realising it was me. We lived together, for goodness sake.
‘He was flashing his lights at me and I was so annoyed that I rapped on his window with the dog lead. He drove off very embarrassed.’
By 1965 their relationship was over but the scandal would fester for a further decade. During that period Scott was married briefly to former debutante Susan Myers and lived with the Anglo-American socialite, Conway Wilson-Young.
‘Conway adored me – he was the opposite of Jeremy who used me and discarded me,’ Scott says. ‘We lived on the first floor and Margot Fonteyn had the basement flat. She used to come with us to parties.’
Scott was also friendly with Tara Browne, heir to the Guinness fortune and the inspiration for the Beatles’ A Day In The Life, and Marianne Faithfull.
After he split from Wilson-Young, Scott moved to Devon where he slept rough in public toilets in Barnstaple before finding work. ‘My life was one of extremes,’ he says.
It is easy to imagine he has grown embittered and reclusive over the years – and that, at least, is how he has been popularly cast.
During our interview at his Grade I-listed medieval longhouse, his home for more than 30 years, Scott – who now makes a living buying and selling horses – insists that is not the case: ‘People think I’m an absolute horror. I’ve been painted as a reclusive villain, but it’s nonsense.
‘I haven’t let what happened with Thorpe shape my life. And I have done rather well. But of course it’s had an impact. The other day I was going to look at a horse. Someone with me, whom I have always trusted, said to the owner, “You realise who he is?” I was aghast someone would do that. But then I am Norman Scott. I can’t shake that.’