Remembrance of Books Past
The third in a planned occasional series of commentaries about books more or less totally forgotten in 2024, but worthy of renewed consideration.
A Very English Scandal: Sex, Lies and a Murder Plot at the Heart of the Establishment, by John Preston; London: Penguin Books, 2017, 340 pp.
If one needed further confirmation of the epigram (Oscar Wilde’s? Bernard Shaw’s?) about Britain and America being ‘divided by a common language,’ one should look no further than the leading 1970s political scandal of each country: the administrative manifestations of – so to speak – That 70s Show. Just as it is impossible to imagine Watergate in a British context, so it is impossible to imagine Jeremy Thorpe’s rise and spectacular fall in an American context. Only by imagining a brand-new version of the USA could the Thorpe affair make sense on the other side of the Atlantic.
Conceive of a Watergate in which there was no Bob Woodward, no Carl Bernstein, no John Sirica, no James McCord, no John Mitchell; a Watergate in which those publishing The New York Times, The Washington Post, and all other major East Coast newspapers had sworn allegiance to Nixon; where Nixon himself usually enjoyed little more day-to-day political influence than, say, the junior senator from Wyoming, but had a reputation for boundless charisma; where he was a lifelong, not to say predatory, homosexual who could rely on mass-media silence in this regard; where he had taken out a contract to assassinate a former boyfriend; where he had gone to exactly the same type of school as most of his opponents; and where one of his underlings had enraged every animal-lover in the nation by slaying the ex-boyfriend’s dog. Anyone who in 1974 had suggested this chain of events as a possible political scenario in Washington DC would have been put in a straitjacket for his own good. Yet a few short years later, this chain of events became the stuff of screaming British headlines.
A Very English Scandal (the basis for a subsequent BBC television series) is billed by its publisher as a ‘non-fiction novel.’ One can only assume that this strange description – is it not rather late in the day to be invoking the example of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood? – was arrived at purely in the hope of winning over readers who might protest at being offered any non-fiction. At any rate, there appear to be no invented conversations; the book’s passages of dialogue are all painstakingly sourced; and Penguin supplies a thorough index. Within the first few pages it becomes, moreover, obvious that the whole affair remained, from start to finish, beyond any novelist’s imagining.
The word ‘chancer,’ so appropriate for Jeremy Thorpe himself, has no exact equivalent in American English. A chancer will always look out for Number One, but he (somehow the term seems to rule out feminine instances) will do more than that. He will skate on ice so thin that almost any other politician – even one without the pachydermatous weight of Thorpe’s even more obnoxious fellow Liberal Party parliamentarian, Cyril Smith – will fall through it and drown. Gambles, whether political or sexual, are innate with him. And he will usually have, as Thorpe long did, a genius for public relations. Though fundamentally unintellectual (no bad thing in a nation as leery as England of intelligence per se), he will demonstrate a wonderful quick-wittedness, such as PR thrives on. Eventually he will incur that most glacial of British rebukes, ‘too clever by half.’ But before then, he will have won to his side a great many otherwise shrewd operators.
Indubitably Thorpe’s career had a striking start. In 1959, when only thirty years old, he entered the House of Commons as a Liberal, narrowly defeating the North Devon constituency’s Tory occupant. Thorpe’s own father and grandfather had been Conservative parliamentarians, and no explicit ideological motive prompted Jeremy to break with familial tradition. Perhaps he had already sensed the merit of an aphorism uttered long afterwards by Quadrant publisher Richard Krygier: ‘Tory scandals are all about sex; Labour scandals are all about money; Liberal scandals are all about sex and money.’ Events would soon show the accuracy of Krygier’s verdict.
The Liberal Party of 1959 seemed to many observers like a lost cause. It had possessed for three years a decent, respected parliamentary leader in Joseph ‘Jo’ Grimond, a veritable Scottish Adlai Stevenson in his bookishness, eloquence, and (there is no denying it) more or less total lack of an instinct for the jugular. During the first half of the 1960s this last shortcoming seemed not to count for much: the Liberals did well in various by-elections and acquired three extra seats at the 1964 general election (which Harold Wilson won only narrowly). But by the next election two years later, Grimond appeared like yesterday’s hero: shortly before the 1966 poll, he suffered an appalling tragedy in the suicide of his son, and the following year – despite an increase in the party’s House of Commons representation – he forsook the leadership.
Thorpe, Eton- and Oxford-educated, waltzed into the job. At thirty-eight, he was Britain’s youngest parliamentary leader in more than a hundred years. Telegenic as Grimond had never been, Thorpe had the knack which has well served so many other politicians: the ability to make each listener feel as if he was speaking to him or her alone. He also had a talent for mimicry, and could come up with the occasional sarcastic one-liner. When the flailing Harold Macmillan dismissed half his cabinet, Thorpe told the Commons, which then still possessed a measure of scriptural literacy: ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.’
What Thorpe actually believed, or whether Thorpe actually believed in anything more than the superiority of being talked about to not being talked about, was even then unclear. The Wildean allusion fits like a glove: Thorpe’s homosexual cruising inspired much discussion among certain of his fellow MPs, but not a whiff of it reached the general public for another decade. Neither of his two wives, one gathers, realised the full extent of it. A cross-party consensus (unthreatened by journalists) prevailed, according to which Labour protected homosexual Tory parliamentarians from punishment, the Tories protected homosexual Labour parliamentarians from punishment, and both major parties could be relied on to stay mum when it came to homosexual Liberals.
By the time that 1970’s general election rolled around, the Liberal Party had become little more than Thorpe’s plaything, and served to promote what had become the most spectacular personality cult in British politics since Churchill. At least Churchill’s personality cult had some recognisable military and political achievements to its credit. Not so Thorpe’s. The sole specific policy with which Thorpe had been associated in the public mind was his insistence that bombs be dropped on Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, a plea which Wilson – no friend of Smith – treated with the contempt that it deserved. Wilson displayed marked abilities in the manipulation of his televised image, what with his pipe-smoking, his trusty Gannex overcoat, and his dutiful public beer-drinking (though in private he much preferred spirits); but neither Wilson, nor the Tories’ chronically awkward Edward Heath, came within light years of Thorpe in terms of the Führerprinzip.
What matter that, as Thorpe’s Guardian obituarist discreetly noted, ‘a faint whiff of sulphur, connected with ballot-rigging, clouded even his election to the presidency of the Oxford Union as long ago as 1951’? Such sharp practice struck many people as understandable, and indeed defensible, in the sacred cause of destroying Britain’s class system. With this cause Thorpe found himself in clear agreement, always provided that the destruction left his own privileges untouched and that he would not be obliged to feign an Albert Steptoe accent.
We learn from Preston that the Liberals adopted for the 1970 election the delirious campaign slogan ‘Faith, Hope and Jeremy.’ It should be here spelt out: this was not intended to be amusing.
Naturally Thorpe, in the previous parliament, had supported the legalisation of homosexuality, which took place in 1967 and for which he of all people had reason to be grateful. (At least one of his early homosexual encounters had been with an under-age partner.) Preston quotes a peer of the time, Lord Arran, who had two crusades of his own: making homosexuality legal, in which he had numerous supporters; and protecting the rights of badgers, in which he had been unable to arouse legislators’ interest.
Afterwards Lord Arran was asked why his homosexual law reforms had succeeded, while his efforts to protect the rights of badgers had not, Arran paused, and then said ruminatively, ‘There are not many badgers in the House of Lords.’
The 1970 election had two big losers above all: Wilson, convinced till the last that he would enjoy another easy victory over Heath; and Thorpe. For whatever inscrutable reason, ‘Faith, Hope and Jeremy’ failed to resonate with electors. The Liberals had emerged from the 1966 contest with twelve seats; 1970 left them with only half that. Without Thorpe’s aptitude for unorthodox fundraising, his position would have been still worse.
Fate intervened in the form of a bereavement so unexpected that none of Thorpe’s numerous Liberal antagonists had the heart to seek his resignation: his first wife, Caroline, suffered fatal injuries in a car accident. Hitherto Thorpe himself had always been able to keep his private life separate from his public life. Caroline’s death seems to have unhinged him – he remained genuinely fond of her, in his limited way – and to have accentuated his habitual recklessness until it became more and more bizarre. His relations with other men had become the subject of anguished discussion in 1971 among Liberal bosses, and only his ability to lie through both sides of his mouth at once enabled him to keep the leadership.
But his nemesis, bisexual and ex-male-model Norman Scott, would not rest. Scott’s complaints were known to those who conducted the intra-party 1971 hearing, and gradually the lunatic idea of sending a contract killer after Scott came to dominate Thorpe’s mind. As it did so, he benefited from one last piece of political good fortune. Heath, who had no legal need to call an election before 1975, decided to call one more than a year early, hoping that a campaign on the theme of ‘Who runs Britain?’ would strengthen his hand against union militants. The result not only failed to strengthen Heath’s hand, it all but kicked over the entire card-table.
February 1974’s election left neither Heath nor Wilson with a majority in his own right. Enter Thorpe the kingmaker: Heath offered Thorpe a cabinet post in an otherwise Conservative government, but Thorpe insisted that the Tories also commit themselves to proportional representation, which would advantage the Liberals and slice great chunks off the votes for both of the other parties. To Thorpe’s demand, Heath said no. Wilson, always more placatory by temperament than his Tory opposite number, made soothing noises in response to Thorpe’s demand. A Labour-Liberal coalition was the result. Wilson, before the year was out, revenged himself on Thorpe by calling another election. This time he got a majority, albeit another narrow one, as he had had in 1964-66. The Liberals, caught by surprise at the threat of two elections inside twelve months (such as had not happened since 1910), contrived a slogan perhaps even more fatuous than ‘Faith, Hope and Jeremy’ had been. Now that Liberals’ talk was of ‘one more heave.’ In raw parliamentary terms it worked somewhat, given that at the October 1974 election the Liberals held most of their ground, losing only one of their fourteen seats. But the party’s share of the national vote crashed by a whopping 700,000 from its February level.
And that was, fundamentally, the end for Thorpe the Liberal leader, though he clung impenitently to office until 1976. (In a suitably gruesome incident during the October election’s television coverage, Thorpe shared screen time with the kiddy-fiddling Cyril Smith and none other than that beloved Liberal activist, Jimmy Savile.)
David Steel, like Grimond a Scotsman, succeeded Thorpe as Liberal leader – not counting a very brief interregnum where the party brought Grimond back – and almost immediately made it evident, in his polite fashion, that Thorpe would be well advised to take a running jump at himself. By this time Steel hardly needed to bother. Britain’s newspapers, after almost twenty years of solemnly treating Thorpe as if he had been a kind of Mother Teresa with a Y chromosome, made up for lost time in the salacity with which they covered his downfall and trial for conspiracy to murder.
George Carman, acting in court for Thorpe’s defence during 1979, quickly decided that the one thing which he must not do was call Thorpe to give evidence on his own behalf. The punishment for Thorpe resembled something out of Dante: for his entire life he had had, basically, relied on nothing save his gift of the gab; and now his own lawyer compelled him to remain silent as the jury pondered the allegations and decided his fate. To almost universal surprise, and aided by a judge whose summing-up suggested undiagnosed Alzheimer’s, Thorpe left the courtroom a free man. Once again the chancer’s luck had held.
Or had it? Peter Bessell, the former Liberal parliamentarian whose dog-like devotion to Thorpe (innocent of any erotic element) had turned first to amazement at the talk of plotting murder, and then to disgust, observed of his former hero: ‘Throughout his life, he had depended on others to extricate him from every personal crisis with which he was confronted.’ Preston comments:
Perhaps it would have been better for Thorpe if he’d been found guilty. Then at least he could have served his time and tried to start afresh.
Britain has traditionally lacked America’s tolerance for repentant sinners. Moreover, Thorpe gave no sign of the slightest repentance for his own sins. He lived for another thirty-five years, never surmounting the role of national joke. For as long as he could, he denied every suggestion of guilt to anyone who wanted to listen, and to a great many who, it must be said, did not. Finally even the gift of the gab deserted him. He spent his last years afflicted with Parkinson’s Disease. And in this suffering – mirabile dictu – he appears to have learnt some humility. ‘Towards the end,’ reported a well-wisher who had visited Thorpe’s nursing home,
he used to communicate with his thumb. Thumb up was yes, thumb down no, and thumb in the middle meant don’t know … but he never complained.
Those lurid headlines are all so long ago now. Of the protagonists in the drama, two alone, in 2024, survive: Norman Scott and David Steel. To read Preston’s gripping account of Thorpe’s Icarusian fate is to become newly impatient with excuse-making clichés.
What destroyed Thorpe’s career was not ‘homophobia,’ or ‘bigotry,’ or ‘the Establishment,’ or MI5, or MI6, or the CIA, or any other such purportedly irresistible force. Far more profound political thinkers than Thorpe have endured much harsher treatment – Nixon himself did – and not only survived it but been actively refined in the fires of persecution. What destroyed Thorpe’s career was his fundamental inability to believe, on more than a fleeting basis, in anything other than the greater good of Jeremy Thorpe. There will always be politicians like him. To misquote Marx: the careerist knows no fatherland.
And this, sadly, is the last edition of The Gods of the Copybook Headings. Its audience size has always been far smaller than I was hoping that it would be, and I have offered refunds to all those who became paid subscribers. If you have not yet received this offer, please let me know. Thanks for all who took an interest in the newsletter.