A Very British Scandal: the real story behind BBC mini-series on Jeremy Thorpe

The rise and fall of former Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe is one of the UK’s greatest political scandals.

Though he was “one of the most colourful politicians of his generation”, says his biographer Michael Bloch in The Sunday Times, Thorpe is best known for his high-profile 1979 trial on charges of having conspired to murder his former lover Norman Scott.

Now, almost 40 years on from Thorpe’s sensational acquittal, the story behind the case is being retold in a three-part BBC drama.

In A Very English Scandal, Hugh Grant plays Thorpe, who is trying to keep quiet his relationship with Scott (played by Ben Whishaw) at a time before homosexuality was legalised in 1967.

The tale “is so bizarre, so improbable and at the same time so revealing of the profound corruption of the British establishment”, says The Guardian’s Anne Perkins, that it seems ”wilfully irresponsible not to make its study a compulsory part of the national curriculum”.

Who was Jeremy Thorpe?

Thorpe was an MP for North Devon from 1959 to 1979 and became leader of the Liberal Party in 1967, aged 37, making him the youngest head of a UK political party in 100 years.

Thorpe had shades of his much-later successor, Nick Clegg, as he was ”the beguiling, charismatic leader of a minority party that was developing interesting, radical ideas about what politics was for”, says Perkins.

The Liberal party improved its standing in parliament throughout his leadership and, by 1974, “he seemed on the brink of power”, says The Independent. The party garnered 20% of the vote in that year’s election but, more importantly, ”Thorpe was the most popular party leader, and (then PM Edward) Heath seemed willing to offer him a power-sharing coalition”.

But in a biography that had to wait until Thorpe’s death before it could be published, Bloch characterised him as a politician who thought the rules were for little people - a bisexual man, who “loved illicit sex for both the immediate excitement, and the later thrill of being able to extricate himself from any potential scandal”.

Though Thorpe was acquitted in 1979, his career never recovered. He died in 2014, aged 85, after a long battle with Parkinson’s.

How did the scandal start?

It arose from allegations by Norman Scott, that he and Thorpe had shared a homosexual relationship in the early 1960s.

Thorpe denied any such relationship, while admitting that the two had been friends. With help from those within the political establishment, he was able to ensure that rumours of misconduct went unreported for more than a decade.

During this time though, “the paths of the two men crossed and recrossed, Thorpe’s career advancing as Scott, suffering from recurring mental illness, struggled”, says Perkins.

Eventually, ”Thorpe and his small gang of cronies concluded Scott was a threat to Thorpe and the party”, Perkins adds.

It was the shooting of Scott’s dog, Rinka, in a layby in Exmoor on 23 October 1975 that “set in motion a chain of events that finally exposed a scandal that might otherwise have lain dormant”, says The Independent.

In May 1976, newspaper revelations prompted by the shooting meant Thorpe was forced to resign as leader. And in 1979 he was tried at the Old Bailey in London for having conspired to murder Scott, with the prosecution alleging the gunman in Exmoor had been paid to shoot Scott.

Before the case came to trial, Thorpe lost his parliamentary seat in the May 1979 general election.

Why is the story still relevant today?

Thorpe’s legacy is “disfigured memorial to the way the establishment could still look after its own even as the forces of modernity slowly washed away at its foundations”, says Perkins.

Indeed, much of the emphasis now is on “the way the ruling class sheltered Thorpe as long as possible”, says the Financial Times’s Robert Shrimsley. Thorpe, educated at Eton and Oxford, the son and grandson of Tory MPs, was “establishment to the core”.

At his trial, judge Sir Joseph Cantley’s summary was virtually a speech for the defence, famously saying of Thorpe’s chief accuser: “He is a crook, a fraud, a sponger, a whiner and a parasite . . . But, of course, he could still be telling the truth.”

This was because homosexuality may have been legal by the 1970s “but it was barely tolerated”, says Shrimsley.

“Revulsion, mockery or pity were the only acceptable responses,” he says, noting that the Private Eye cover bore the words “buggers can’t be losers” following Thorpe’s acquittal in 1979.

Indeed the judge’s “summing up was so comically biased it became the basis of a famous sketch by Peter Cook”, adds The Independent.

The real story of the Thorpe affair, then, “is the state-sanctioned climate of hostility in which gay men understood that exposure meant ruin”, Shrimsley adds. “We have travelled so far and so fast that it now seems astonishing to recall how bad things were so recently”.