I Once Met…
It was Monday 12th March 1973, at an Indian Journalists’ Association dinner in the Connaught Rooms (not, alas, the Connaught Hotel), to celebrate India’s Republic Day.
My aunt, Dame Joan Vickers, then an MP, sometimes invited me to such occasions. I was 21 and had started work that day in the back office of a merchant bank, resigned to months of tedium. The dinner was somewhat in contrast – and the guests of honour were Robert Carr, Shirley Williams and Jeremy Thorpe. I met Jeremy Thorpe briefly with my aunt before the dinner.
The dinner itself went on and on, with speech after speech. There seemed no end to them. But at a given point, all the MPS were summoned to a vote. This, I thought, was also my chance to escape. In the lobby, I could not find my aunt – but Jeremy Thorpe materialised. ‘Do you need a lift?’
In the car, which he drove himself, were Peter Shore MP and his wife; they in the back and I in the front. Thorpe raced the wrong way down tiny one-way streets near the Strand, blowing his horn with gusto.
When we arrived at the Palace of Westminster, he escorted me to his office and poured me a gin and tonic. Then he went off to vote. On his return, we had a fascinating conversation about how he regretted that my aunt did not speak clearly enough in the chamber, as she said interesting things but could not always be heard. He spoke of his imminent marriage to Lady Harewood and how they would start their married life in the home he shared with his son, Rupert, then about to turn four. I bemoaned my new job and spoke of what I really wanted to do in life (and which I have in fact since done, as a writer).
Jeremy Thorpe was a great mimic: he proceeded to do a fine Bob Boothby. I realise now that I might have been in some danger, but there was no hint of it. He bade me goodnight with much theatrical bowing, and off I went, thinking, ‘I have just had a drink with the leader of the Liberal Party.’ I never met him again, but on 10th December 1980, a year after his trial (for conspiracy to murder), he and his wife, Marion, attended a celebrity carol service in St Peter’s, Eaton Square, arranged by a man called Ian Hall. To my astonishment, a face caught my eye in a side aisle. I asked the friend next to me to look. ‘If it’s not him, it’s his twin brother,’ she said – Norman Scott. After the service, Hall escorted the Thorpes to their car. As Thorpe left, he tried to chat to Esther Rantzen – who smiled, but held back – and (unlike David Steel a year before, who was horrified), he did not mind when the ebullient Hall kissed him goodbye. I saw Scott follow the Thorpes out of the church. But he did not attempt to approach his satanic old lover. He just watched. The Thorpes’ car drove off. I looked round. Scott had disappeared into the night. Hugo Vickers