The Norman Scott I knew was as needy as his TV portrayal
Once upon a time, I wrote Irish footnotes to an extremely evilyet-farcical English scandal – the one where Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal Party, plotted to murder his gay lover, Norman Scott. When Thorpe was on trial in the Old Bailey for conspiracy to murder in 1979, the Irish elite closed ranks to draw a veil over Scott’s exploits here.
A colleague and I dug out details of Scott’s crazy life among the local upper classes for Ireland’s first colour tabloid as news from the trial in London shocked the world.
Much of the Irish detail is in the BBC’s mini-series ‘A Very English Scandal’ the final episode of which will be screened this evening. And even though most viewers know that it ends in a shocking aberration of justice, the series has attracted huge viewing figures.
Thorpe’s acquittal on charges of conspiracy and incitement to commit murder flew in the face of overwhelming evidence that his friends hired a hitman to murder Scott.
We tracked Scott down and found that he was a whinger with an enormous sense of entitlement. Many friends in Ireland had sheltered him, but he would not identify them for fear they would become the targets of tabloid news hounds (like me).
Scott had competed in the Dublin Horse Show 18 years before, but his mount fell at a jump, and he broke six of his vertebrae. At the time, 1963, he was a casual lover of Thorpe, a newly-elected MP. But Scott confounded everyone by disappearing to Mount Melleray, a Cistercian monastery in Co. Waterford that offered free bed and board. While he was on retreat there, Scott began a sexual relationship with a brother of a monk.
In a church near St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin, Scott told his confessor that he was suicidal – and Jesuit priest Fr Michael Sweetman arranged lodgings for him in Ballsbridge. An emissary of Thorpe’s met Fr Sweetman in Dublin and said Scott was ‘deranged’. But the Jesuit priest demurred: ‘No, he’s not deranged.’
Scott had an affair with a Dublin woman who owned a boutique and she asked him to model clothes she designed. She paid for a doctor to ‘cure’ his homosexuality by checking into the Portobello Nursing Home in Fitzwilliam Square where he was anaesthetised for a week. He was supposed to wake up a rampant heterosexual. But the evening he was discharged, Scott went to a pub, picked up a man and they went back to his flat: Scott said the cure was ‘a dead loss’.
In Dublin, Scott befriended Tara Browne (de Brún), an heir to the Guinness family, and spent time in Leixlip Castle, including a weekend with the Rolling Stones. Nine months later, Tara died in a crash immortalised in the Beatles’ ‘A Day In The Life’.
He was also friendly with top Dublin model Suzanne Mcdougald who went on to become a successful art dealer and gallery owner, and was appointed to the board of the National Gallery in 2016. And Scott often dropped the name of a longdeceased Fine Gael TD in Dublin. Contacts made through Dublin’s fashion clique had him move to London and when I spoke to him in 1979, Scott said he had not been in Dublin for some years. But when we asked his friends in Ireland about Norman Scott, doors were usually slammed and phone calls not returned. Scott explained that a gunman shot dead his Great Dane called Rinka in Devon in 1975, but that the weapon had jammed when pointed at him. Thorpe was charged with conspiracy to murder but was acquitted on all charges in 1979. And while he was the innocent victim of a murderous scandal meticulously hushed up by the English establishment, Norman Scott was irritatingly needy. Last week, former Tory MP, gay icon and columnist Matthew Parris referred to a comment he made when Thorpe was alive: ‘I am sorry that Thorpe did not try to have Scott murdered. I would have.’ Mr Parris is an excellent judge of character.
A taxi driver tells me that foreigners visiting Dublin last weekend saw repeal campaigners dressed in the nun-like red cloaks and white caps from the dreary ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ TV series… and assumed they were a hen party on a pub crawl.