Jeremy Thorpe: Former Liberal Party leader dies aged 85

Former leader of Britain's Liberal Party Jeremy Thorpe has died aged 85. Thorpe was a prominent politician in parliament and on television, whose career ended in scandal following allegations of a gay relationship, a murder conspiracy to keep it quiet and the killing of a dog.

On June 22nd, 1979, after a trial that attracted worldwide attention, Thorpe was found not guilty on charges of conspiring to murder Norman Scott, a former stable hand and male model.

A gunman, Andrew Newton, was supposedly hired to meet Scott in 1975, but the only resulting casualty was Scott’s Great Dane, Rinka. Three co-defendants were also acquitted.

The acquittals came too late to save Thorpe’s political career. The scandal cost him his seat in parliament and forced him to resign his leadership of the Liberal Party. Male homosexual acts were illegal in Britain at the time.

An Old Etonian with an illustrious family background, Thorpe would have had little difficulty in making his way in the Conservative Party. Both his father and his maternal grandfather had been Tory MPs. Another political ancestor, Mr Speaker Thorpe, was beheaded by a mob in 1371.

Radical spirit

He left Oxford with a third class law degree, but his career as a barrister never really took off. Beneath the foppish exterior, however - he always wore a waistcoat and a watch-chain - a radical spirit was trying to escape.

He contested the North Devon seat for the Liberals in 1955, halving the majority of the sitting Tory member. On the campaign trail, he was a phenomenon, ruthlessly exploiting his gift for mimicry and mocking his opponents, his savage wit directed in particular at the more feudal aspects of rural conservatism.

In 1959, aged only 30, he contested the seat again and won, a shot in the arm for a party which had hardly seen a young Liberal since he was born. Yet even he could scarcely have anticipated that he would become leader of the party - though then consisting of only 12 MPs - at the age of 37.

It was not much of an inheritance. Harold Wilson’s landslide victory in 1966 meant that any talk of a Liberal-Labour pact was off the agenda, and all Thorpe could do was to hunker down and hope for better times.

He remained a dazzling comic turn. Wilson would invite him to dinner purely to hear his devastating impersonations of Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan.

He had caused permanent damage to the latter’s reputation in responding to his dismissal of seven cabinet ministers in one go with an adaptation of the words of St John: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.”

Whatever the truth of Norman Scott’s accusations of a gay relationship with him, allegedly going back to 1961, the threat of blackmail had already surfaced and payments to stave off a public scandal had been made. Despite this personal pressure, Thorpe was able to effectively rebuild the Liberal Party during this time.

Coalition hopes

He led his party into the general election of February 1974, prompted by the miners’ strike, securing more than six million Liberal votes and 14 seats. His eagerness to negotiate a coalition with Edward Heath’s Conservatives did not please his party, however, and he was forced to back down.

His final three years in the Commons, until his defeat in North Devon in 1979, were poignant and painful ones, both for him and his colleagues. He had to live each day under the shadow of rumour and innuendo, and eventually, in 1978, under the direct threat of criminal charges arising from allegations that he had sought to silence Scott.

Thorpe’s political strengths remained his vigour and his ability to convey important political opinions and facts in language to which the electorate could respond.

His familiarity on the TV screen, his imposing presence in the TV studio, his ability to switch from being the clown to the serious statesman, all helped to give the Liberal party - perpetually poised on the brink of extinction - a credibility that it would otherwise have lacked.

Speaking to The Guardian on the Scott affair in 2008 he said: “If it happened now the public would be kinder.”

Thorpe suffered from Parkinson’s Disease for more than 30 years. His first wife, Caroline Allpass, died in a road accident in 1970. His second wife, Marion Stein, died in March. He is survived by his son, Rupert.