I recommend this biography, especially to any Liberal Democrats feeling down in the dumps. The third party has known far worse times than this. The general election of 1970 left the Liberals with just six MPs. As the joke of the time had it, they could be fitted into the back of a taxi. At the head of this shrivelled band was Jeremy Thorpe, dandy, exhibitionist, superb showman, shallow thinker, wit and mimic, cunning opportunist, sinister intriguer, idealistic internationalist and a man with a clandestine homosexual life.
Homosexual acts were illegal when Thorpe was coming to prominence and gay politicians ran the triple risk of blackmail, nasty criminal penalties and career ruin. Even when the law was repealed, many more years had to pass before any politician could come out as gay and hope to survive. Yet it was one of the hypocrisies of that era that so long as they were reasonably “discreet” about it, gay politicians could enjoy a successful career, even a glittering one. An influential figure on the Labour benches was the prodigiously promiscuous Tom Driberg. The Tory ranks included the bisexual Bob Boothby who pursued liaisons with characters from the criminal underworld at the same time as having an affair with the wife of the prime minister, Harold Macmillan.
When Thorpe became leader of his party at the precocious age of 37 his secret was already widely known at Westminster. For he was far from careful. On Bloch’s often jaw-dropping account, he was compulsively promiscuous and all classes were represented in his choice of partners “from heirs to peerages to rough proletarian youths”. He boasted to friends that he had seduced TV cameramen, footmen at Buckingham Palace receptions, even policemen on duty at the House of Commons. He played with fire by sending compromising letters, often on House of Commons stationery. At the time of Princess Margaret’s wedding to Anthony Armstrong-Jones, Thorpe sent a friend a postcard: “What a pity about HRH. I rather hoped to marry the one and seduce the other.” His main taste was for men younger than himself and from less privileged backgrounds whom he might dominate in the guise of playing a protective role. When he became leader, he promised anxious colleagues that he would curb himself and get a wife. He did get a wife, cynically telling his press secretary that he thought it would boost the party’s poll rating, but he did not curb himself. During his engagement, he bragged of having sex with “a New York street boy he had picked up in Times Square and taken back to the Waldorf Astoria”. Even Driberg, whose recklessness was legendary, urged Thorpe to take care after hearing gossip about the Liberal leader from rent boys that they both used. Michael Bloch indulges in some psychological speculation about why Thorpe had such a “craving for dangerous adventure” and conjectures that he had “a subconscious longing to be caught and punished”. Or maybe he just liked a lot of sex.
His nemesis was Norman Scott, a stable boy who had spent his early adult life in and out of psychiatric clinics, and with whom Thorpe had a brief relationship in the early 1960s. Thorpe always denied that it was physical. Bloch doesn’t come to a firm conclusion about that and I sympathise with his predicament. Despite their very different backgrounds, the stable boy and the Old Etonian were both fantasists. At many points in a tale populated by a lot of unreliable characters, we have to choose between the word of one liar and another. Thorpe’s history with many other young men suggests that he did have sex with Scott. “Bunnies can (and will) go to France,” he wrote to Scott. “Yours affectionately, Jeremy. I miss you.”
Scott persuaded himself that he had been cruelly treated by Thorpe and went on a vengeful campaign. For fear of being destroyed, Thorpe tried to buy his silence. When that arrangement broke down, there was a rather pantomime plot to murder Scott. Rinka, his great Dane, was shot on Exmoor. Scott survived when the bungling assassin’s ancient revolver jammed. So he told the jury in the subsequent Old Bailey trial, which held the nation transfixed. This plot has many byzantine twists and turns. In the hands of a less accomplished writer, the reader could easily get lost in the thicket. Bloch’s narrative achievement is to tell the remarkable tale with clarity while taking care to try to sift fiction from fact.
Thorpe’s career was as dead as Rinka, but he was acquitted of conspiracy to murder. The prosecution witnesses were unappealing and key ones had changed their stories. The judge’s sympathies were heavily with the defendant and he did not conceal his contempt for Scott, telling the jury he was “a hysterical, warped personality… a neurotic, spineless creature, addicted to hysteria and self-advertisement”. The forewoman of the jury was a member of the Liberal party. Was he lucky to get off? Many thought so at the time, but the laws of defamation prevented anyone from saying so publicly while he was alive. Without quite saying so explicitly, Bloch steers us to the conclusion that Thorpe was guilty, writing that “the murder plot, which had probably began as a fantasy, became an obsession which, in the contention of the prosecution at his trial, he sought to bring about in reality.” He also suggests that Thorpe may have arranged the murder of an earlier gay lover who threatened to expose him.
Bloch’s account gains in credibility because his Thorpe is not all black: credit is given to his political achievements where it is due. He helped found Amnesty International. He was a passionate voice against Ian Smith’s racist minority rule in Rhodesia and the apartheid regime in South Africa. He supported the abolition of the vicious laws against gays. For he was not a hypocrite in that respect. His most significant contribution to history was to help Ted Heath pass the legislation taking Britain into the European Common Market. Without Liberal votes, it would have been lost. Bloch also makes a persuasive case that Thorpe, an inventive electioneer, was a pioneer of modern campaigning. For a period before he was ruined, he swept his party off its feet and charmed a fair bit of the country, presiding over a Liberal revival which took the party to a level of popularity it had not seen for half a century.
The Lib Dem peer Baroness Seear said of Thorpe: “You’ll never get to the bottom of him.” Michael Bloch proves her wrong in this revealing, insightful and gripping biography of one of the most extraordinary people ever to lead a British political party.
Jeremy Thorpe by Michael Bloch is published by Little, Brown (£25). Click here to buy it for £20
