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TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – certificate PG. Cast your mind back to 1975. Or, if it’s easier, 2018 when the BBC broadcast the brilliant A Very English Scandal, with @HackedOffHugh and Paddington, er, Ben Whishaw.
A lot of exciting things happened in 1975. For one, I was born! Look at that gormless smile. I haven’t changed a bit.
It was also the year that this man decided his ex-boyfriend had to die.
Jeremy Thorpe was leader of the Liberal party, pre-cursor to the Lib Dems, who, like now, only had a handful of seats. Well, maybe two handfuls. But, just as in 2010, the number of seats held by the two big parties was so close the Liberals suddenly became a very big deal indeed.
(Sidebar: Cleggmania is one of those things that we’ve collectively decided to forget happened because we’re embarrassed about it, isn’t it?)
Compared with Labour’s ageing Harold Wilson and the Tories' frankly weird Ted Heath, Jeremy Thorpe seemed an exciting, groovy, go-getting kind of guy. He came across well on TV (he’d been a presenter on ITV before politics). He did things like hanging out with Jimi Hendrix.
In the run-up to the second general election of 1974 (yep, two in one year: they came around even more frequently than they do these days) he campaigned by hovercraft, zooming up on beaches around Cornwall and Devon and generally showing off.
He always dressed in a deliberately flamboyant and old-fashioned style. Mrs Thatcher once asked him “Why do you wear that silly hat?” He replied “It’s my trademark, like Chamberlain’s umbrella or Churchill’s cigar.”
Mind you, she could talk.
The only thing Jeremy Thorpe liked more than being the centre of attention was shagging blokes. All sorts of blokes. “His choice of partners seems to have embraced all classes, from heirs to peerages to rough proletarian youths,” his biographer Michael Bloch writes.
(Sidebar: this is one of the most amazing biographies ever written. Thorpe, elderly and in bad health, co-operated with Bloch on condition that it wouldn’t be published in his lifetime – and then obstinately refused to die for a further 24 years.)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jeremy-Thorpe-Michael-Bloch/dp/0316856851
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jeremy-Thorpe-Michael-Bloch/dp/0316856851
Bloch continues: “If he had a general preference, it seems to have been for men who were young, handsome, slightly effeminate and easily dominated.”
Nothing wrong with that of course – except that Thorpe was first elected as an MP in 1959, when men having sex with any type of men was, in the words of a famous book that we will return to later this week:
Even when homosexuality was legalised in 1967, the age of consent was set at 21 (compared to 16 for straight sex). Equality wouldn't be achieved until 2001. And as cartoonist Willie Rushton noted at the time, the law only applied to “a homosexual act… being done in private”.
Even in the 1970s, to be revealed as gay would be political suicide. So did this make Thorpe – who married twice – circumspect in his behaviour?
Er, not so much. He was a regular at gay pick-up joints, using the line “Do you know who I am?” He wrote letters to boyfriends on House of Commons stationery. He entertained them at parliament and introduced them to colleagues as “young men I’m trying to help in life”.
His letters to a lover in San Francisco were intercepted by the FBI, who tipped off the UK authorities. When Princess Margaret married Anthony Armstrong-Jones, Thorpe wrote to a friend on a Parliamentary postcard “A pity – I rather hoped to marry the one and seduce the other.”
He boasted about seducing cameramen who filmed interviews with him for the news, footmen at Buckingham Palace receptions, and policemen on guard duty at the House of Commons.
Despite all this, when one particular ex-boyfriend, Norman Scott kept threatening to go public about his 1960s affair with Thorpe, the Liberal leader decided he had to be silenced. At first he tried to pay him off, via two friends in his party.
That didn’t work. So Thorpe told them they’d have to murder Scott instead, saying “it would be no worse than shooting a sick dog.” What a charming man!
Thorpe came up with various whacky ideas on how to do it, including - and I promise I am not making this up - throwing him down a tin mine in Cornwall, or taking him to the Everglades in Florida and feeding him to alligators.
Eventually they settled on just shooting him instead, and hired a hitman. Thorpe asked one of the Liberal party’s biggest donors to give him £10,000 to pay for some “irregular election expenses” that needed to be kept off the books.
But the gunman cocked it up, and – irony alert coming up – shot Scott’s dog instead. Rinka was an enormous Great Dane, and by all accounts a Very Good Girl.
Norman Scott, happy to say, survived, and is with us still. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jeremy-thorpe-tried-to-kill-me-norman-scott-on-the-scandal-that-shook-seventies-britain-2bzq0lnk8
Four years later, Thorpe was found not guilty of conspiracy to murder, thanks partly to witnesses' testimony being corrupted by chequebook journalism, but mostly to a shamelessly biased summing-up by the judge, parodied here by Peter Cook.
Hang on, I hear you say. Surely you haven’t tried to sell us your new book for ages? What’s all this got to do with it? Well I shall tell you.
Tommy, my hero, investigating another murder, blunders into the middle of the plot to kill Norman Scott, uncovers details incriminating Thorpe – including an infamous love letter in which the politician wrote “Bunnies can go to France” - and embarks on a quest to get justice.
I’m not going to say any more because it would spoil the story. But suffice to say in my version things work out a little differently to A Very English Scandal – and indeed real life.
Certain elements – like the big part my current employer, Private Eye, played in exposing the scandal, have made it into my fictional version. Although sadly not Eye columnist Bron Waugh standing against Thorpe in his constituency for the Dog Lovers Party.
(sidebar: @sheilamolnar, the woman given the job of holding that dog’s lead during the photoshoot in Soho Square 41 years ago, is now the managing director of Private Eye and boss over all of us. Which just goes to show… something.)
If you’d like to buy the book that Adam Curtis off the telly said “takes you into the secret world of Soho in the 70s, and then opens a door into the hidden world of violence and corruption that still lies underneath the England we know today”, go here: http://eye-books.com/books/beneath-the-streets
If you use the code RINKA at the checkout, you can get 30% off and free UK p&p. Or if you prefer e-books, Amazon have it for £3.99.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beneath-Streets-Adam-Macqueen-ebook/dp/B08574SNBJ/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=adam+macqueen&qid=1586362338&sr=8-1
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beneath-Streets-Adam-Macqueen-ebook/dp/B08574SNBJ/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=adam+macqueen&qid=1586362338&sr=8-1
Tomorrow, if you'd care to join me, I'll be introducing some of the other real-life political villains who I've entangled in my plot. Till then, happy hovercrafting.
