Jeremy Thorpe was a charismatic leader of the Liberal Party who fell from grace in one of the most spectacular political scandals of the 20th century
Jeremy Thorpe, the former leader of the Liberal Party who has died aged 85, suffered a fall unparalleled in British political history when a long-drawn-out chain of scandal dragged him into the dock at the Old Bailey, charged with conspiracy and incitement to murder.
For once the cliché “trial of the century” did not seem misplaced. Thorpe had been a sparkling and successful politician who had come tantalisingly close to realising the Liberals’ dream of holding the balance of power. In 1974, indeed, he was invited by the prime minister, Edward Heath — whom he had once described as “a plum pudding around whom no one knew how to light the brandy” — to lead his party into coalition with the Conservatives; he himself was offered the post of foreign secretary.
It was understandable, therefore, that five years later, at Thorpe’s trial, even prosecuting counsel should have spoken of a “tragedy of truly Greek and Shakespearean proportions”. Tragedy, however, is a large word, implying the destruction, if not necessarily of virtue, at least of some outstanding merit. Only in the context of a man’s entire life can its just application be decided.
John Jeremy Thorpe was born on April 29 1929 into a highly political family. He would claim descent from Sir Robert de Thorpe, who was Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas in 1356 and Chancellor in 1371.
More to the point, both of Thorpe’s parents were staunch Conservatives. His father John Thorpe, born in Cork, was a KC and, for a few years after the First World War, MP for Rusholme in Manchester. His mother was the daughter of Sir John Norton-Griffiths, 1st Bt, another Conservative MP and one who gloried in the epithet “Empire Jack” — even if he owed his baronetcy to Lloyd George.
Jeremy Thorpe, however, thought of himself as “three-quarters Celt”; and in keeping with this bias, it was from his mother’s friend Lady Megan Lloyd George that, rather to Mrs Thorpe’s disapproval, he imbibed a romantic attachment to Liberalism.
The boy had two sisters, both older; he was brought up as the cynosure of his parents’ eyes. “It never occurred to him,” his mother remarked of his early days in Kensington, “that anybody might not be glad to see him.”
Young Jeremy adored his father, but it was his mother who exerted the most powerful influence. A formidable woman, who affected an eyeglass, Ursula Thorpe nursed the highest ambitions for her son. “That monocle!” Thorpe recalled in later life. “We were all frightened of her. I have overcome the domination, and I am damn well not going to be dominated again.”
Thorpe was only six when tubercular glands were diagnosed in his stomach. For seven months he had to lie on his back in a spinal carriage; he suffered back pains for the rest of his life.
The Second World War caused a hiatus in what promised to be a conventional English education. In 1940 Thorpe and the younger of his sisters were sent to stay with an aunt in America, where he attended the Rectory School in Connecticut, by contemporary English standards a decidedly easy-going establishment.
Thorpe loved it. His histrionic gifts — and in particular his talent for mimicry — began to flourish. He played Miranda in The Tempest, became an accomplished violinist, and showed precocious assurance as a public speaker.
In 1943 he returned to England to go to Eton, where the more rigorous discipline proved less agreeable. He was also greatly upset by the death of his father, after a stroke, in 1944. This misfortune left the family in dire financial straits, so that an uncle had to stump up the funds to keep the boy at Eton. It also, inevitably, increased the sway of Mrs Thorpe.
After Eton, Thorpe joined the Rifle Brigade for his National Service, only to be invalided out of the Army after six weeks as “psychologically unsuitable”. It has been alleged that he became a bed-wetter to prove the point.
At Trinity College, Oxford, by contrast, the military reject flourished outrageously. His flamboyant dress — frock coats, stove-pipe trousers, brocade waistcoats, buckled shoes, and even spats — received all the attention they demanded; his penchant for Chinese vases suggested aesthetic sensibility; his witty persiflage kept the mockers at a distance.
Theoretically, Thorpe was reading Law; in reality he was laying the foundations of his political career. But though he became in turn president of the Liberal Club, the Law Society and the Union, he attracted criticism from contemporaries for the ruthlessness he showed in the pursuit of these offices.
Thorpe scraped a Third in his Finals. Afterwards, in 1954, he was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple, and built up a modest practice on the Western Circuit. He also, later in the 1950s, worked for commercial television, appearing regularly on current affairs programmes such as This Week, and sending back reports from Africa and the Middle East.
But politics was always his master passion. In 1952, with the help of Dingle Foot, whom he had befriended when at Oxford, he was adopted as Liberal candidate at North Devon which, though it had been a Liberal seat in the early 1930s, had a 12,000 Tory majority in the 1951 General Election.
Thorpe, at his very best on the stump, had no rival as a vote-gatherer. He could put any argument with skill and panache; his astonishing memory for faces persuaded voters that they were intimate friends; his brilliant gifts as a mimic kept the audience in stitches; his resourceful mind afforded quips and stunts for every occasion.
At the same time he built up a formidable organisation in the constituency, and drove it with unflagging energy. In the 1955 general election the Tory majority was slashed to 5,226, and four years later he captured the seat by 362 votes. Thorpe would hold North Devon for 20 years, narrowly at first, but in February 1974 with a thumping 11,082 majority. Yet he was never tempted to appeal to wavering Tory voters by trimming his Liberal views on issues such as South Africa or capital punishment.
In the House of Commons he made an immediate impression. A sketch-writer remarked of his maiden speech that “it seemed as though Mr Thorpe had been addressing the House for the past 10 years, and got rather tired of the exercise”. But the young MP knew how to draw blood, as with his jibe after Harold Macmillan sacked several of his Cabinet in 1962: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his own life.”
Thorpe appeared somewhat to the Left of the party, a mouthpiece for impeccable Liberal sentiments, especially on African affairs. He received the distinction of being banned from Franco’s Spain.
In 1966 he advocated that Britain should cut off the oil supplies to Ian Smith’s Rhodesian regime by bombing that country’s railway system. The Liberal conference enthusiastically applauded the idea, but Harold Wilson inflicted permanent damage by coining the phrase “Bomber Thorpe”.
Thorpe flanked by Edward Heath and Harold Wilson at Westminster Abbey in 1970
Meanwhile, though, the young MP had been working energetically to fill the organisational void left by Jo Grimond’s leadership. Thorpe’s charm made him especially effective as a fund-raiser, and in 1965 he captured the party treasuryship.
When Grimond retired in 1967, the 12 Liberal MPs elected Thorpe in his place. The new leader immediately gave a foretaste of his style by holding a rally in the Albert Hall, at which he promised “a great crusade that will set Britain alight for the vision of a Liberal society” — a performance relayed by closed circuit television to three other city centres.
Nevertheless, in his first years at the helm the showman for once misjudged his act. “He felt he had to move away from the image of the sharp and witty debater to being grave,” David Steel remembered. “It was disastrous.”
Yet Thorpe did not altogether abandon frivolity. Colleagues found, to their frustration and fury, that important policy discussions had to wait upon the leader’s gossipy anecdotes about the prime minister or royalty. Nor did Thorpe’s continuing addiction to outmoded dress and eccentric headgear — notably the brown bowler hat he wore when electioneering — do anything to allay the growing suspicion that he was all style and precious little substance.
His critics acknowledged that he loved the game of politics — indeed he took a fiendish delight in its Machiavellian plots and manoeuvres — but they wondered if he knew why he was playing it.
Thorpe’s Liberalism was essentially romantic and emotional. He reacted strongly against bone-headed Establishment snobbery, arrogant management or racial injustice, but showed scant interest in formulating any coherent political philosphy.
On the other hand there was no doubting Thorpe’s quick mind or his keen antennae. He was to the fore in predicting the 1967 devaluation crisis and in identifying the mounting crisis in Ulster; he also showed himself a consistent supporter of Britain’s entry into the Common Market.
Thorpe did not suffer fools gladly. Erring subordinates were treated to the sharp rebuke or the snappish aside; and in the face of any challenge to his authority the mask of the jester quickly gave way to a fixed, distant and icy stare. He was at his most formidable under pressure, as the Young Liberals discovered when they attempted to mount a coup in 1968.
The unsatisfactory opening years of his leadership culminated in the 1970 general election. Thorpe campaigned with his accustomed zeal, sweeping about the country in helicopters and cutting an impressive figure on television, but the results were disastrous.
The Liberals polled only 2.1 million votes and retained only six seats. And then, less than a fortnight after the election, Thorpe’s wife Caroline was killed in a car crash.
For a while Thorpe appeared to lose interest in politics. But in 1972 and 1973 the widespread dissatisfaction with the Heath government found expression in a remarkable series of Liberal successes in municipal and by-elections.
Thorpe’s style was undoubtedly a factor in attracting discontented Tory voters. But his animadversions against the “bloody-mindedness” of British life were undermined, at the end of 1973, by his involvement in a shoddy financial disaster.
Thorpe had become a director of Gerald Caplan’s London & County Securities to boost his meagre parliamentary salary; in his delight at the sudden flush of income, however, he failed to heed numerous and reiterated warnings about the company’s viability.
In 1972 the Liberals, and Thorpe himself, put on a notable display of piety over Reginald Maudling’s involvement with the Poulson affair. It was therefore more than a shade embarrassing when it transpired that the leader was involved in a company that was charging 280 per cent on second mortgages, and when, at the end of 1973, the collapse of London & County revealed a tangled skein of financial misdemeanour.
British voters, far from being concerned, were apparently impressed by Liberal promises to tackle the national crisis with increased public spending and state control of incomes. At the February 1974 general election Thorpe, though largely confined in his marginal North Devon constituency, reached his political apotheosis. The Liberals nearly trebled their vote to six million; the only fly in the ointment was that this total translated itself into but 14 seats.
Rumour had it that Thorpe was responsive to Heath’s offer of a coalition, with the promise of a Speaker’s conference to consider electoral reform. His colleagues, however, have gone on record that the decision to reject these terms was “unanimous”.
The ensuing months exposed the flaws in the Liberal revival. The party activists were radicals; many of its new-found supporters were dissatisfied Tories. Moreover, the exquisite Thorpe seemed far removed from the community politics advocated by Trevor Jones (“Jones the Vote”) and his chums.
In the October 1974 general election, the Liberal leader left his North Devon constituency to its own devices and once more whisked about the country in helicopters and hovercraft. All to no avail: the Liberal vote fell by 700,000.
Thorpe was severely disillusioned. But the most remarkable thing about his political career was not that he ultimately failed to storm the heights, but that he managed to retain the sang-froid to lead the Liberals when, all the while, a large part of his energies was concentrated on repressing a significant element of his personality.
That Thorpe, in his youth, had homosexual tendencies was admitted at his trial. Nor was it in dispute — though he always emphatically denied any physical relationship — that in 1961 he had befriended a young man named Norman Josiffe, who later changed his name to Norman Scott.
Though Mr Justice Cantley’s conduct of the trial was widely criticised, no one argued about his description of Norman Scott. “He is a fraud. He is a sponger. He is a whiner. He is a parasite.” Scott claimed to have had an affair with Thorpe between 1961 and 1964, and there can be no question whatever that, as their meetings dwindled and finally ceased, he conceived a grievance that nothing but the ruin of Thorpe could assuage. (It should be remembered that homosexual acts between consenting adults were not legalised until 1967.)
In pursuit of his vendetta Scott seized every possible occasion, public and private, to advertise his sexual connection with Thorpe. As early as December 1962 he blurted out the story to the Chelsea police, and gave them two letters he had received from the MP, one of which contained the phrase — “Bunnies can (and will) go to France” — that would become notorious when, 14 years later, it finally reached the public domain.
During that time Scott bore the menace of a time-bomb ticking away in the shadows of Thorpe’s career. The fuse was unpredictable, but intermittent splutters constantly portended some vast explosion.
Thus in 1965 Scott took it upon himself to write to Thorpe’s mother setting out the details of his homosexual relations with her son. This missive prompted Thorpe to make the cardinal error of confiding in Peter Bessell, a fellow Liberal MP.
Thorpe in his office at the Houses of Parliament, 1970
One of the most striking features of the affair was that Thorpe, for all his public glamour, seemed to have no upright friend to whom he was prepared to turn for counsel. Bessell was a Methodist lay preacher; he was also, as he himself would all too willingly confirm under cross-examination, amoral, hypocritical and untruthful.
Bessell tried to contain the danger to Thorpe by going to see Scott, by purloining compromising letters, and subsequently by paying Scott small weekly sums which Thorpe refunded. He also sought, and appeared to receive, assurances from the home secretary, Sir Frank Soskice, that the police were not interested in pursuing Scott’s allegations.
But Thorpe’s anxiety could not be assuaged as long as the possibility remained that Scott would one day succeed in finding a newspaper to print his story. And after the Liberal leader had married Caroline Allpass in 1968, he had even more to lose — though the best man, David Holmes, wrote that Caroline Thorpe “knew about Scott” before they were married.
In May 1969 Scott himself married; and his son was born that November. The marriage soon broke up, but not before the experience of connubial penury in a Dorset cottage had lent a hysterical edge to Scott’s importuning of Bessell. Worse, there was the threat — never, in fact, realised — that Scott would use the divorce proceedings as an opportunity to blurt out his accusations about Thorpe under the protection of court privilege.
Another crisis developed in 1971. Scott, now living in North Wales, became the lover of a widow, Mrs Gwen Parry-Jones, who, treated to the usual accounts of Thorpe’s iniquities, duly reported them to another Liberal MP, Emlyn Hooson. A Liberal Party inquiry into the affair ensued.
Thorpe fought like a tiger, denying the allegations point blank and enlisting the help of the home secretary, Reginald Maudling, to confirm a somewhat misleading summary of police dealings with Scott. It was Thorpe’s word against that of his tormentor, and the Liberals chose to believe their leader.
Next year, 1972, Mrs Parry-Jones died, and at the inquest on her death Scott at last had the opportunity to tell his story in court. But no editor cared to print his wild ravings; nor did a South African journalist, Gordon Winter, find any takers when he gathered material from Scott.
It might have seemed that Scott had done his worst, and been repelled. In 1973 Thorpe announced his engagement to Marion, Countess of Harewood, previously married to the Queen’s cousin.
About the same time Scott moved to Thorpe’s North Devon constituency, where he proceeded to inflict the history of his relations with the local MP upon bemused rustics in pubs. He also told his tale to the Tory candidate, who decided not to touch it.
Just before the first general election of 1974, David Holmes succeeded in purchasing some letters from Scott for £2,500. Nevertheless, Scott the persecutor now appeared in the role of victim.
In February 1975 he was beaten up by two men in Barnstaple market. And in October, when an AA patrolman discovered him weeping beside the corpse of his great dane, Rinka, he claimed that only a jammed pistol had prevented the assailant from shooting him as well as the dog.
In January 1976 Scott, charged with defrauding the DHSS, declared under the privilege of court that he was being “hounded by people” because of his affair with Jeremy Thorpe. This time, at last, the press did take notice. Thereafter rumour blew so loud that by March Thorpe felt compelled to defend himself in The Sunday Times, specifically denying both that he had hired a gunman to kill Scott, and that he had had any knowledge of Holmes’s purchase of the letters in 1974.
Despite support from the prime minister, Harold Wilson, who appeared to believe that the accusations had been fabricated by the South African secret service, Thorpe was unable to hold the line. After the “Bunnies” letter was published in The Sunday Times in May 1976, he resigned the Liberal leadership.
Thorpe leaving the Liberal Club in 1977
There could scarcely have been any criminal charges against him, however, if Bessell, who had long been exiled in California, had not decided to turn Queen’s evidence. He believed, with good reason, that Thorpe would not hesitate to throw him to the wolves in order to save his own skin.
Bessell alleged that in 1968 and 1969 Thorpe had incited Holmes and himself to murder Scott, helpfully suggesting that the body might be chucked down a Cornish mine shaft, or cemented into a motorway bridge. “It’s no worse than killing a sick dog,” Thorpe is supposed to have remarked, before recommending research into slow-acting poisons.
The second charge associated Thorpe with Holmes and two others on a charge of conspiracy to murder in the years 1974 and 1975; this also depended partly on Bessell’s evidence, though in this case the diversion of Liberal funds through Holmes’s hands to the hitman, Andrew Newton, was also germane.
Thorpe behaved with marked courage in the face of the cataclysm, observing with his accustomed brio that a man who had the prime minister, Lord Goodman and MI5 on his side could hardly lose.
Even after his committal to trial at the Old Bailey Thorpe insisted on contesting North Devon at the 1979 election, where his opponents included Auberon Waugh, standing for the Dog Lovers’ Party. Though Thorpe lost the seat (he remarked laconically to a television interviewer that Scott’s allegations had “hardly helped” his campaign), his vote fell by less than 5,000 compared with October 1974.
Norman Scott in 1979
At the Old Bailey the charges failed after the defence, with the help of Mr Justice Cantley, had annihilated Bessell’s character. Thorpe opted not to give evidence in his own defence, thus avoiding cross-examination.
Even so, his reputation was badly damaged by the exhibition of the financial sleight of hand which he had shown in directing funds given to the Liberal Party by the millionaire “Union Jack” Hayward towards David Holmes. He was also revealed as a blustering bully in his attempt to dissuade his friend Nadir Dinshaw, the Pakistani financier, from telling the truth.
Dinshaw, acting on Thorpe’s command, had innocently passed on money to Holmes. Before the trial Thorpe told him that if he reported the fact, “It will be curtains for me, and you will be asked to move on.”
In short, the trial bore out the impression created by Thorpe’s political career, that he was essentially a fixer and an operator. Far from being a tragic hero — a noble nature ruined by a single mole of nature — he appeared, whether innocent or guilty, amply provisioned with common human flaws, cast by his gifts and ambition into most uncommon relief.
Yet this man, who spent so many years trying to avoid imputations of homosexuality, won devoted loyalty from both his wives. “I saw an emotional cripple take up his bed and walk,” someone remarked of his first marriage.
For a while after the trial Thorpe seemed to nurse the dream of rebuilding his career. In 1981 he applied unsuccessfully for the job of race relations adviser to the BBC, and the next year he was actually appointed director of Amnesty, only to resign the post after complaints from within the organisation.
Thorpe with his wife, Marion, in 1999
Thorpe remained chairman of the political committee of the United Nations Association until 1985, but in the world of the haut monde that he loved to adorn there would be no redemption. By the middle of the 1980s, moreover, he was afflicted with Parkinson’s disease.
The North Devon Liberals, however, remained faithful to the last, electing him as their president in 1987.
Jeremy Thorpe’s second wife died in March of this year; he is survived by his son, Rupert, from his first marriage.
Jeremy Thorpe, born April 29 1929, died December 4 201
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