Has any leader EVER fallen so far?
Once on the brink of power, Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe — who died yesterday — ended up in the dock, accused of plotting to murder his gay lover in a scandal so lurid his party still can’t escape its shadow
WITH his trademark Homburg hat and jaunty double-breasted silk waistcoats, Jeremy Thorpe was a timeless dandy whose flamboyant style always marked him out as different from other political leaders. His brilliant oratory and wit as Liberal leader doubled their vote to more than five million in the General Election of February 1974 and arguably rescued the party from oblivion. His private life, however, dragged the party back to the brink of disintegration.
For this was a private life that became very public in 1979 when twice-married Thorpe was sensationally charged with hiring a hitman to murder a man who claimed he had been his gay lover at a time when homosexual acts were illegal in Britain.
Five years earlier, as Tory leader Edward Heath desperately tried to form a coalition government with the Liberals, he had offered Thorpe the post of Home Secretary. Perhaps it was providential that Thorpe, who died yesterday aged 85, made too many political demands for the negotiations to succeed, and that in the end a minority government was formed by Labour’s Harold Wilson.
Otherwise it would have been a former Home Secretary stepping into the dock at the Old Bailey charged with attempted murder as well as, with three others, conspiracy to murder.
Thorpe, born into the Establishment as the son and grandson of Conservative MPs, a product of Eton who graduated with a law degree from Trinity College Oxford, was defended by the most celebrated QC of the day, George Carman. He denied ever having had a sexual relationship with a male model, Norman Scott, or that he was homosexual.
What emerged was a bizarre story involving blackmail claims, sexual debauchery, the shooting of a pet dog and, of course, an apparent murder plot that went wrong.
Thorpe had taken over the Liberal leadership from Jo Grimond in 1967, and was doing rather well, with some
He wept over the corpse of his shot dog
spectacular by- election victories, when Scott emerged in 1971 with his claims. Scott was appearing in court in Barnstable, North Devon — Thorpe’s constituency — on a minor social security charge when he shouted out: ‘I am being hounded because of my sexual relationship with Jeremy Thorpe.’
Thorpe issued a denial. But Scott, an effete, immature young man with mixed feelings about his own sexuality, was soon offering details about his friendship with Thorpe to party figures and journalists, saying they had enjoyed a two-year love affair beginning in 1961. Gay sex between consenting adults was not made legal until 1967.
Thorpe could not have had more to lose. At the time the alleged affair started, he had been MP for North Devon for two years and was seen as a rising star.
Youthful and dynamic, he was a pioneering campaigner for human rights, especially against apartheid in South Africa.
His sophisticated wit in particular was soon seen as a trump card in political circles, typified by his droll observation when Conservative leader Harold Macmillan sacked a third of his Cabinet: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.’
As leader he promised to turn the Liberals into a radical and pioneering moral force, a sanctimonious pledge which could just as easily have come from his Lib-Dem successors.
Remember this was the Liberal Party whose MPs included the now notorious paedophile Cyril Smith — elected Rochdale’s Liberal MP at the height of the scandal in 1972. And in recent times, the Lib Dems exonerated the alleged groper Lord Rennard from any wrongdoing.
Long before Thorpe was elected leader, there had been questions and gossip about his sexual orientation. Now there appeared to be confirmation of his homosexuality.
Scott was telling people he had met Thorpe while working as a stable lad in the MP’s constituency, where he lived. He claimed that
‘Jeremy would have made a brilliant PM’
soon after their first meeting, Thorpe drove him to his (Thorpe’s) mother’s house in Surrey where they had sex in the spare room which had caused Scott to ‘bite the pillow’. He added that the party leader had called him ‘Bunny’.
As proof of their relationship, Scott produced what he described as ‘love letters’ written to him by Thorpe, one of which said: ‘Bunnies can and will go to France.’ This, allegedly, was a reference to Thorpe promising to find him a job in France.
Initially, the allegations resulted merely in an internal inquiry, which exonerated Thorpe. But Scott would not be quietened. As time passed, he seemed to become increasingly fragile emotionally, sometimes threatening suicide — and often claiming he would reveal ever more details about Thorpe.
What happened next led the Liberal leader and his alleged co- conspirators into the dock of the No 1 court at the Old Bailey. The sequence of events emerged during the case. Prosecutors claimed Scott had become such a danger to the Liberal leader’s reputation that Thorpe told a fellow Liberal MP: ‘We have to get rid of him.’
They added that a former airline pilot, Andrew ‘ Gino’ Newton, was paid a sum variously described as between £5,000 and £20,000 from Liberal Party funds to solve the problem of Scott with a gun. The crucial issue that faced the Old Bailey was whether Newton was paid to frighten Scott — or to kill him.
The jury heard that in 1975, when Thorpe had been Liberal leader for eight years and felt threatened, Newton, posing as a journalist seeking information on Thorpe, took Scott on a drive to Exmoor.
On Porlock Hill they stopped and got out of the car. Newton then produced a gun and shot Scott’s dog, Rinka, a Great Dane. According to Scott, Newton then turned the gun on him, but it jammed, and Newton drove off leaving Scott weeping over the corpse of his dog.
The following year Newton faced charges over the shooting at Exeter Crown Court, where he maintained that his intention had been to frighten Scott. The reason Newton gave was that Scott possessed incriminating photographs of him.
For his part, Scott, then 37, brought Thorpe into the case by telling the Exeter court that the Liberal leader threatened to kill him if he spoke about their affair. Newton was jailed for illegal possession of a firearm and intent to endanger life, but that was not the end of the affair. Scott’s allegation against Jeremy Thorpe in open court had opened a Pandora’s Box, and three months after Newton’s trial Thorpe was forced to resign the leadership (to be succeeded by David — now Lord — Steel).
Worse, when Newton emerged from prison in 1977 he told a different story. He now claimed he had in fact been hired to kill Norman Scott, and this led to Thorpe and three others being charged.
And so on May 8, 1979, just a week after losing the North Devon seat he had held for 20 years to the Conservative candidate as Margaret Thatcher swept to power, Thorpe faced trial in the Old Bailey. It lasted seven dramatic weeks, characterised by humourist Auberon Waugh who wrote: ‘There is no tradition in British political life by which party politicians hire gunmen to murder.’
Advised by George Carman, Thorpe exercised his right not to give evidence from the witness box, where he could be cross-examined. Carman argued that although Thorpe and Scott had been friends there had been no sexual relationship.
He claimed that Scott had tried to blackmail Thorpe and that was why the Liberal leader and his friends had discussed ‘frightening’ Scott into silence, but they had never conspired to kill him. One key prosecution witness, who gave Queen’s evidence in exchange for immunity from prosecution, told a different story.
Peter Bessel, a former Liberal MP, claimed to have been present while a murder plot was discussed. Poison, he said, had been considered and rejected, but there had been talk of shooting Scott and disposing his body down a mine shaft.
But Carman, in his legendary style of soft, incisive probing, destroyed Bessell’s credibility by unearthing the fact he had sold his story to the Sunday Telegraph for £25,000 if Thorpe was acquitted, but that this would be doubled to £50,000 if he was convicted. Mr Justice Cantley,
in summing up the case, described Norman Scott as ‘ a crook, an accomplished liar . . . a fraud’ which led to him being widely criticised for showing a nakedly pro-Establishment bias.
So much so, that the satirist Peter Cook produced what was regarded as one of his finest sketches, doing an impersonation of Cantley’s final address to the jury, which included the line: ‘You are now to retire (as indeed should I) carefully to consider your verdict of Not Guilty.’
Even so, the jury initially reported that they were locked 6-6. And only after 15 hours of deliberation did they reach a verdict: Not Guilty. So Jeremy Thorpe left court a free man, but his career was over. He was just 50. Not long afterwards it emerged that he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, and he retired from public life.
Throughout these destructive years of crisis one figure stood resolutely and loyally with him — his second wife, Austrian-born Marion Stein, the brilliant concert pianist and co-founder of the Leeds International Piano Competition.
Thorpe’s first wife Caroline, an impressionist art expert at Sotheby’s, had been killed in 1970 in a car crash with a lorry while driving from Devon to join him and their oneyear-old son Rupert in London.
Three years later he married Marion. She had been married to the Queen’s first cousin the late 7th Earl of Harewood, by whom she had three sons (the eldest of whom, David, is the 8th and current Earl).
But the earl had formed a relationship with violinist Bambi Tuckwell by whom he had another son, and they were divorced in 1967.
Marion never ceased being Jeremy’s greatest admirer. ‘He is so loved,’ she declared one election time while plodding round the constituency with him.
At their home in Bayswater she nursed him as his Parkinson’s worsened until, some years ago, she, too, was struck down by mobility problems and confined to a wheelchair.
Nothing changed her view of Jeremy as the most romantic and entertaining of men who would have made ‘ a wonderful Prime Minister’.
With his enormous talents and brilliant oratory, in different circumstances that may not have been so far from the truth.
Nothing delighted her more than when, almost 30 years to the day that he was put on trial for attempted murder, the Liberal Party that turned its back on him after his trial held a champagne reception marking his 80th birthday. Just before the party, however, she suffered a stroke, and in March this year, Marion died.
Suddenly for Thorpe, at the age of 85, there was new upheaval. For their London home, a handsome, Grade II-listed house in Orme Square, Bayswater, belonged to the Harewoods.
The 7th Earl had allowed Marion to live there as part of the divorce settlement, but on her death the 8th Earl put it on the market for £17 million. Jeremy, who remained a Privy Counsellor but was denied the peerage for which he yearned, had to leave.
He was not homeless, however, as he always kept a house in Devon.
Also still living quietly in Devon is Norman Scott, now 72. But they never met again.