A very English scandal

In 1979, the former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, along with three others, was accused of conspiring to murder his former lover Norman Scott also known as Norman Josiffe.

Jeremy Thorpe was an energetic, liberal politician. He was charming, charismatic and witty, confident and ambitious. He was popular. But behind the surface there was another Jeremy Thorpe, quite different from the well-known respected public figure. Thorpe was a homosexual.

Homosexuality was a criminal offence in the United Kingdom until 1967 when the Sexual Offences Bill, supported by the then Home Secretary Labour Roy Jenkins, decriminalised homosexual acts between two men over 21 years of age.Although the truth about his sexuality would have instantly ended his political career, Thorpe was taken enormous risks. He had many relationships with men but most of them were short and clandestine. In the summer of 1961, Thorpe met the 19 years old Norman Josiffe (he later changed his name to Norman Scott). Though the relationship was relatively brief, it was the one that almost two decades later would destroy Thorpe’s political career and will create the biggest scandal in twentieth century British politics.

The unlawfulness of homosexuality made Norman Scott a threat, when Thorpe became a leader of the Liberal Party in 1967. At that time the affair was over, but old letters from Thorpe to Scott were still hanging around, in missing suitcases somewhere in Austria, and hidden in a safe in the offices of Security Service.

To keep Scott and his affair with him away from the public eye, Thorpe began to contemplate extreme measures. Scott had to be vanished from the face of the earth. With the help of an old friend, Thorpe hired in 1975, an unprofessional hitman, called Andrew Newton, to kill Scott. The whole thing would be laughable were it not so terrifying for Norman Scott. Newton only succeeded in shooting Scott’s dog, an enormous dane called Rinka. At his trial, he admitted shooting the dog, but he claimed, falsely, that he’d never intended to kill his Scott, just to frighten him because Norman Scott had blackmailed him.

It was just a matter of time for the whole affair to become public. Thorpe was forced to resign as leader of the Liberals in 1976. He subsequently lost his seat in the 1979 General Election. It ended with Thorpe put on trial for conspiracy to murder and he went on trial at the Old Bailey, also in 1979. The prosecutor called the whole story a tragedy of Greek or Shakespearean proportions. The Judge Joseph Cantley, in an astonishing sum up speech which left the jury in no doubt where his sympathies lay, had characterized the trial as "bizarre and surprising." Norman Scott, he said, was a crook and a parasite, Jeremy Thorpe in contrast, was a distinguished national figure. Thorpe and his three fellow defendants were acquitted. Yet rumors were already rife among politicians and journalists; Thorpe’s political career come to a humiliated end. We had to wait 40 years for the truth to comes to light.

An engaging and grim story of scandals, lies and betrayal, lives destroyed by dirty politics and homophobic culture, a real example of judicial misconduct or how the establishment take care of itself.