The Rest Is History - 65. A Very British Scandal

Episode Date: June 21, 2021

Jeremy Thorpe was the most flamboyant politician of his day. Leader of the Liberal Party for nine years he was tried at the Old Bailey for conspiracy to murder his former lover Norman Scott. Although acquitted, the case destroyed Thorpe’s career. Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland discuss this extraordinary story, which includes the murder of Scott’s dog Rinka. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, welcome to The Rest is History, and I want to start today's episode by reading an index entry from a book called Seasons in the Sun, The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979. And in the index of this book, we find Thorpe jeremy 1979 election contracts gonorrhea from greek prostitute plans to have his ex-lover eaten by florida alligators scandal trial wades ashore from sinking hovercraft and wilson and the man who compiled that index and wrote the book, Dominic Sandbrook, is, well, he's not sitting alongside me, he's in Chipping Norton and I'm in Brixton, but

he's virtually sitting alongside me. The Jeremy Thorpe scandal. Now, this is a topic that lots of our British listeners will recognise because Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw were recently in a brilliant drama series about it, a very British scandal. Those beyond Britain may not have the first idea what this is. So we've got the questions written down here. Our most common question from all non-British listeners, what was the Jeremy Thorpe scandal? Dominic, what was the Jeremy Thorpe scandal? Yeah, that's a good question. What was the Jeremy Thorpe scandal? Well, first of all, thank you so much. I love doing those indexes.

I'm glad you read that out. And we should say, shouldn't we, Tom, this isn't our idea for the podcast. This is sent in by a listener, wasn't it? By Paul Keeley. By Paul Keeley. So, Paul, this one is for you. And if nobody listens, it's all your fault.

So what was the jeremy thorpe scandal well that's basically what the podcast is about so i won't give all the details away but to cut a very long story short jeremy thorpe was the leader of the liberal party in the 1970s so the liberal party was as a regular listeners of the podcast will know it was one of the great the two great parties of of sort of british democracy in the 19th century but in the 20th century it had a pretty tough time and it declined. But under Thorpe, it seemed to be making a bit of a comeback.

So the Liberals won almost 20% of the vote in February. This is the 70s? Yeah, in February 1974. And so, you know, you might say... That's the election where he was going around in a hovercraft? No, it was in the next election in October 1974. We'll come back to the hovercraft. So Jeremy Thorpe is the leader

of the Liberal Party. And as implausible as it may seem, his great sort of, you know, his ride to the top of British politics is interrupted by the fact that he's accused of conspiring to murder his former lover, a stable hand and sometime model

called Norman Scott. And at first people think this story is completely mad. But then when they start looking into it, they see there's a bit more to it than that. And as the story unfolds, it brings in all these sort of bizarre characters. So you've got a fruit machine dealer, you've got a carpet salesman. There's a plot, as you alluded to, to murder this man in Florida and feed him to alligators. It sort of starts to suck in the Labour government. The newspapers run it day after day after day. And it becomes this colossal kind of core celebrity in the 70s Britain. A lot of questions are, why did it matter? I think one answer to that is it seemed to reflect a general sort of comic seederness about British politics

in the 70s and a sense of breakdown and so on. And actually, it happens at the same time as Watergate or a year or two after Watergate, but it's a much more amusing story than Watergate. And also, it is quite a tragic story, as you'll discover when we sort of go through it there's lots of sort of broken lives involved amid all the sort of you know the sort of carnivalesque sort of bawdy farce so i mean basically we so in the past we've done we've just done adolf hitler yeah muhammad done the origins yeah we've done the origins of

islam we've done the french revolution vast sweeping themes here we're going up really up close to a subject that non-british listeners and even many british listeners will have never even heard of it and yet it is an absolutely brilliant story and as you say it it does kind of reveal all kinds of things about 1970s brit, but also because it's about a gay affair. And this is kind of midpoint between homosexuality having been criminalised in the 60s when Jeremy Thorpe is an up and coming young MP and is not worried about it being criminal. I mean, he seems to have enjoyed it. He seems to have enjoyed the whiff of danger. And of course, where we are now, where homosexuality is completely accepted so it's also a kind of interesting temperature take on the course of that that

change as well so i think in all kinds of ways it it well merits an episode um and i guess we should begin with jeremy thorpe himself so we have a question from stephen clark um he's always sending us great questions and it says about Jeremy Thorpe the son of a conservative MP an old Etonian a Trinity College man possessing an obsession with marrying Princess Margaret how did Jeremy Thorpe end up as leader of the Liberal Party because he should probably have been a Tory shouldn't he? Well he came from a Tory family and this is actually a really interesting story about liberalism so liberalism had been the sort of governing creed of Britain for much of the 19th century,

and was the creed that Britain took into the First World War. And then liberalism really falls from grace. And no ambitious politician will join the Liberal Party. I mean, you'll join the Labour Party or the Tories. But the Liberal Party kind of lives on in Britain. I mean, that's one of the interesting stories about British politics in the 20th century, that we now have a Liberal Democrat Party

and the liberal tradition never disappeared. And it sort of survived on what you call, I'm not being rude, but there's kind of fringes, the geographical fringes. So North Wales, Scotland, and particularly in the Southwest, in Cornwall and Devon. And these are places with a big kind of Methodist tradition.

So they're sort of dissenting kind of places. They're a long way from London. And serious places. Yeah, exactly. If you're an earnest person, there's no real big trade union movement there. So you don't join the Labour Party if you're a sort of self-improving,

sort of working class autodidact or something, or somebody who goes to chapel and really takes it seriously, you join the Liberal Party. And you wear socks with sandals as a stereotype. Well, that is the stereotype, that you're kind of very well-meaning and you think a lot about the plight of the poor in foreign lands and that sort of thing. Now, Jeremy Thorpe is this consummate bounder.

I mean, he is the bounder's bounder. You know, he's... At Eton, his one big thing was he played the violin. Then he goes to Oxford and he throws himself into the world of Oxford politics. He becomes president of the Oxford Law Society, becomes president of the Oxford Union, which is a sort of classic staging pose

for ambitious politicians. But he doesn't get involved with the Tory party, which you would expect. He's drawn. And I wonder whether even at this stage, there's this sort of, Thorpe is incredibly flamboyant and he's clearly gay. He knows he's gay, I think.

So there's a question from, well, it's not even a question, it's a comment from Lou Smorrells. All I remember about Jeremy Thorpe was his bad taste in hats. Yeah, so he wears a hat after everybody else no longer wears a hat. He wears a hat at a point where a hat is a sort of mark of eccentricity. Yeah. And I think he went into the Liberal Party because,

if you were very talented, he's very funny, he's very clever, he's a barrister. Brilliant mimic. He's a brilliant mimic, exactly. so if you can do all those things you know there are they're ten a penny in the tory party sort of posh bounder types whereas if you go into the liberal party where basically it's incredibly stayed and downbeat you know you can be leader of the liberal party you can become your personal vehicle and i think there's an element of Thorpe knowing that, you know,

it's almost an easy ride. He can go and join. I mean, all of that said, Tom, before we set Thorpe up as this comic figure, he's also genuinely liberal. And he's very hostile to apartheid, isn't he? So he's a committed opponent of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Yes, exactly.

And actually that's going to run through this through this whole story the south african connection so this is he enters british politics in the 50s really and from that point onwards you know um being very anti-racist being very anti-apartheid being very kind of progressive on these kinds of issues really marks you out in politics it's Because it's not really that usual in... I mean, there are people in the Labour Party and there are some tourists. And especially not when combined with a penchant for wearing hats. Not if you're flamboyant. That's the weird thing. Being flamboyant in British politics often means you're very right-wing. Thorpe is not like that.

He's absolutely committed to human rights and to these kinds of issues that get him big ticks from the sort of socks and sandals people. But he's funny. He's very funny. Here's a question. So he's committed to human rights. He's anti-racist. Was he also committed to gay rights? And so is his homosexuality, he's gay, but he's flamboyantly gay at a time where it's illegal. So he's constantly skirting the edge of danger. Is that a purely personal thing or is he making a political point by doing that? No, he's not making political points at all. Right.

So he, Tom, I think is really, I don't want to just end up lecturing you about sort of mid-century Britain. So tell me to shut up if I get too much. No, no, they were better on this and your account of it is so brilliant. So Thorpe's you know, he's a young meteor entering politics in the 50s and then the 60s, at a time

when people live in terror in utter terror of being exposed as gay so there had been a case, the youngest member of the House of Lords, Lord Montague of Bewley, had been sent to prison. He'd been jailed for,

I can't remember what it was, whether it was carrying on in public toilets or something. But this was the classic thing that happened in the 50s. You'd go to look for action, as it were. And then it turns out that the guy you've picked up is actually an undercover policeman. And you're busted and you're taken to court, you know, straight away and exposed in the newspapers.

And bang, your career is over. But your wife stands by you and then... Yeah. ...reports to you a couple of years later. That's the classic pattern. Now, Thorpe, as a young man, clearly had this taste for kind of rough trade you know there's a lot of kind of picking people up in pubs and stories about picking people up in toilets or

street corners and taking them back to his kind of rooms and then in the morning he'll give them three pounds and off they go and he does he does a lot of it going abroad so he goes off to greece which is where he gets his gonorrhea. And he mutters about it to some of his friends, or he hints at it to his confidence. But by and large, you keep this kind of thing very quiet. If it comes out, it will destroy you, because homosexuality is not then going to be decriminalized until the very end of the 1960s right so so when does jeremy thought meet norman scott who is this stable hand um emotionally damaged i think it would be fair to say um not not the most balanced of boys does does thought meet him once homosexuality is

is legal or still no no it's still illegal so it's quite early so the the the murder so the attempted murder which will come to doesn't happen till the mid-70s but they meet in 1961 i think the beginning of 1961 oh goodness that early i hadn't realized it's very early they meet actually just down the road from where i am now at kingham stables near chipping norton so it's literally about sort of three minutes drive from where i am in this beautiful chocolate boxy kind of village. They meet there. Thorpe has gone, I think, for a house party or something like that.

And he meets this guy who's working as a stable hand. Now, at that point, the guy is called Norman Joseph. He's not called Norman Scott. The fact that he changes his name gives you some sense of the kind of slight chaos of his life. And he's, as you say, he's a sort of a damaged, kind of disturbed guy who has an ambition to, among other things, to become a male model.

He meets Thorpe. Thorpe obviously takes a fancy to him and says, you know, keep in touch. And they do keep in touch. And what happens is this guy ends up getting fired, I think, from the stables or leaving under under a cloud and he's he he loses his national insurance number this is now this is we had a couple of questions my favorite question probably my favorite question we've ever had

crowfoot can you get me a new national insurance card so can you get me yeah so this is the question that that norman scott is always asking jeremy thorpe can you get me a new national insurance card so can you get yeah so this is the question that that norman scott is always asking jeremy thorpe can you get me a new national insurance yes this hangs over this whole story um and for foreign for overseas listeners are utterly bewildered by this your national insurance card basically had a number on it that you needed to get a job and you had this card and if you couldn't remember your number or i assume you i mean to be honest it's not something that i fully understand the mechanics of. But you basically need to show it to get a job so they could be registered and that they would pay the right tax and all the rest of it.

So he's left this stable under a cloud and he hasn't got his card. And he becomes obsessed with the idea that Thorpe can get him a new national, because Thorpe is an MP. So he's a big person. Anyway, Thorpe takes get him a new national, because Thorpe is an MP. So he's a big person. Anyway, Thorpe takes him home. Thorpe, they end up meeting. Thorpe takes him to his mother's house, his mother Ursula, who Thorpe has this very close relationship with. And allegedly, that's when Thorpe first kind of deflowers him.

And anyone who has seen the dramatisation of this, the recent one, will remember the magnificent way in which Hugh Grant says bunny. Yeah, yes. I can't adequately do homage to the way that Hugh Grant says bunny. I'm tempted to do it, but I don't want to become a meme. No. So bunnies must and will go to France?

Yeah. So, what happens is, they obviously see each other a few times, and Thorpe makes a series of promises to Scott, to Joseph, as he's calling himself. Sorry, he's not calling himself Scott yet. And he gives him small amounts of money, he lets him stay, and so on. And

Joseph, stroke Scott, has an ambition to go to paris i think it is and become a model yes and thorpe sort of says oh we can do that or something but but it kind of doesn't really mean it and and basically tires of him and at some point writes him a note where he says bunnies can and will go to france or whatever he says that's completely the wrong voice by by the way. Yes, you sound like Churchill. I can't imagine Churchill saying that. Well, Churchill would probably say

it made him proud to be British or something like that, wouldn't he? Anyway, he writes this note, and Joseph Strokescott keeps it, which is disastrous. He's keeping everything that Thorpe is giving him. And he's kept a letter in which Thorpe says that he wants to marry Princess Margaret or something.

Have I got that right? So Thorpe is very well connected. So it's all getting older and older. Thorpe is very well connected. And at one point, at the beginning of the 1960s, Thorpe's friend, Anthony Armstrong Jones, marries Princess Margaret. So Thorpe is very connected with these society people. And Thorpe is gutted by this.

And he says, you know, to be quite frank, I wanted to marry one and sleep with the other or something. And of course, you know, that's a joke, but it's kind of in the context of a society in which homosexuality is illegal. That's not a great thing for an aspiring politician to write. And especially not in a letter that your potentially blackmailing, very damaged ex-lover has. So time ticks by and Thorpe basically is broken. He's ditched this guy.

I mean, this guy to Thorpe, I think, is nothing. In the TV drama, Russell T. Davis, the writer of the drama, kind of creates this very tragic and sort of sense that it was a kind of frustrated or doomed romance, that there was something that could have been bigger than it was. But I think in reality, Thorpe didn't really think anything of Norman Joseph or Scott as he became. He was just a passing fancy among many young men that he picked up and dropped. But for Norman, this looms larger and larger in his mind. And he thinks that Jeremy Thorpe has betrayed him. And crucially, that Jeremy Thorpe has stolen his national insurance card.

Okay, so we come back to that. Yeah, so the national insurance, you get a sense of how sort of slightly disturbed this guy Joseph is. That the national insurance card, I mean, people must have been losing their national insurance cards all the time in 60s Britain. You know, I mean, the government must have been deluged by people saying, I've lost my national insurance card, can I get a new one? Of course, it's more difficult to keep changing your name,

but he's just obsessed with this bloody card and thinks that Jeremy Thorpe is frustrating his attempts to get a new one. So this would all be nothing. This would be immaterial, were it not, for two things. Jeremy Thorpe's star is rising within the Liberal Party, but also politics itself is becoming more and more febrile in 60s Britain, as sort of Britain's relative decline becomes more and more apparent. So in other words, the Liberal Party, from being this joke in the 1950s, is going to assume a bigger and bigger sort of role on the stage. And that means that Thorpe himself is going to become much more of a public figure. And that's what happens. He becomes leader of the Liberal Party. So Jeremy Thorpe becomes leader of the Liberal Party. Is that before or after the decriminalisation

of homosexuality, which is 67? Yeah, it's just before. So he becomes leader of the Liberal Party in January 1967. But homosexuality is decriminalised i think a little later um now that's that doesn't really matter what matters is that the the stigma is still there and for people i think who've grown up as it were you know people have spent so long as it were in the shadows leading illicit sex lives or lives that are perceived to be illicit i don't think just because the law has changed you know it becomes kind of hurrah i can it's hard for maybe younger listeners to appreciate just how great the stigma was i mean it's yeah astonishing change it's astonishing societal change well it's probably one of the biggest in our lifetime tom i would imagine it's probably the single biggest kind of moral cultural cultural change, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely. The extent to which it was utterly stigmatized, even when we were growing up in kind of 70s. So when homosexuality was perfectly legal, there was still the stigma. And for somebody like Thorpe, you know, a generation or two older, it must have felt almost like every day he was you know he was walking around with a kind of giant arrow over his head and that one day people are going to notice and that then that would be the end of everything i mean it must have been utterly terrifying so that is what makes um

norman scott's increasingly importunate demands on him, a cause of anxiety. And these demands are becoming more and more importunate the higher that Thorpe rises up the Liberal Party, becomes leader, and then going into the 70s, it's a period of immense political turmoil. And Thorpe is a player. He's not just on the periphery. He's someone who might actually end up in the government because the balance of power means that the liberals might come in and take part in the coalition. So exactly.

So suddenly this, I mean, no offence to kind of antiquated liberals listening, but suddenly the slight joke party from the 50s, certainly by 1974, could hold the balance of power and Thorpe, this sort of bounder who's been basically driving this rackety old vehicle, suddenly he could have a place at the top table. And the thing

is for Thorpe, he's a very funny man, he's a dandy, he's popular, he's younger than the other two-party leaders, Ted Heath and Howard Wilson. They both look a bit kind of shop-soiled to people. They've been sort of endless negotiations with union leaders and, you know, constantly going on the news

and sort of making broadcasts to the nation with bad news that the power is going to be cut off or something. And Thorpe is young, he's flamboyant, he's funny. He's got hats. Yeah. People say, well, he's a breath of fresh air. People love a man with a hat. They do.

I mean, who doesn't like a man with a hat? Nobody. Well, apart from loose morals. John F. Kennedy. He was the first president not to wear a hat at his inauguration, I believe. Supposedly, he destroyed hats overnight because he didn't want a hat to mess up his nice hair. I think the aptly named loose morals would approve of.

Yeah. So anyway, so Scott is all the time now badgering. Sorry, Josephus changed his name to Scott. That's one strange, confusing thing. So he's all the time badgering Thorpe for money. And for, you know, why doesn't he respond to my letters? Why doesn't he? And it's at that point, I think, that if the account of the prosecution at Thorpe's trial is to believe,

it's at that point that Thorpe decides there's only one solution. He's going to have to kill him. And maybe we should take a break. We should absolutely take a break. So Jeremy Thorpe, leader of the Liberal Party, the potential kingmaker in mid-70s Britain, may possibly have decided that he needs to murder his lover. Don't go away. We'll be back after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early

access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. hello welcome back to the rest is history we are talking the jeremy thorpe scandal um when uh when we we left you for the commercial break um dominic was had set us up beautifully um dominic jeremy thorpe's supposed alleged plot to have Norman Scott done away with. And I apologise for almost laughing there. It's a terrible thing. No, but that's the weird thing about this story. It's both blackly comic and tragic, isn't it? Yes.

Okay, so talk us through what happens. What are his plans? So what's happened is at the end of the 60th, Thorpe has been – he's got a couple of sort of cronies involved in this. And he said, you know, I'm being hassled by this bloke who won't leave me alone. He's going round. Scott has even written a letter to Thorpe's mother saying,

as you know, Jeremy and I have had a homosexual relationship. He seduced me and all this sort of stuff. So he's really plaguing Thorpe. And Thorpe has two cronies. One is a guy called David Holmes, who's a kind of liberal flunky. And the other is a liberal MP called Peter Bessel, who is a very dodgy person who ends up fleeing the country for fraud

and settling in California. And these are the two men that Thorpe decides to involve. And he says, can you basically pay Scott off? But Scott won't shut up. So he starts to have these conversations where Thorpe says, well, I think the thing to do is just to kill him. We should won't shut up. So he starts to have these conversations where Thorpe says, well, I think the thing to do is just to kill him. We should arrange to murder him. And now Thorpe says later, well, this was all just a joke. I mean, at one point he says,

Bessel claims that Thorpe said it would be no worse than shooting a sick dog, which given that they did, a dog does end up dying. It seems, I think that's a detail that's probably invented. But anyway, so there are three schemes, I think, as far as I understand it, that Thorpe suggested. One is that his friend David Holmes should disguise himself as a German businessman and then break Scott's neck in a pub in Devon or something. That was no good because Holmes had never, I mean,

I don't think he'd ever... Broken someone's neck. No, I don't think he'd ever had a fight. To be fair to the Liberal Party. So that's idea one. Idea two is that Holmes is going to lure Scott to the pub, poison his drink so that he dies, and then throw his body down a mine shaft on Exmoor.

Holmes says that won't work because if he... Why is he called Holmes? It adds an extra level of weirdness and parody to the whole thing quite recently says how will that work like if I poison his drink in the pub it'll die in the pub everybody will see I can't smuggle his body out and throw

it down a mine so that's no go and Thorpe says fine lure him to Florida, into the Everglades, and have him eaten by alligators. It's like Tom Sharp, actually, isn't it? It's not Carry On. It's a Tom Sharp novel. It is.

See, that's the point at which you can say, Thorpe might well say, I was joking. Because you can kind of see how that is a conversation with over drinks that's kind of got out of hand. So they talk about this, but nothing really happens for a while. And then I guess you get to 1974 and suddenly Thorpe is not just a rising star. Suddenly he's kind of in there. He's on the front pages because Ted Heath, the prime Minister, has called an election with the country absolutely going to pot

and the miners out on strike and the lights going out. Ted Heath calls an election to get a new mandate and it completely goes wrong. There's a hung parliament and Heath has coalition talks with Thorpe. And this talk isn't that Thorpe is going to become Home Secretary? Thorpe would become Home Secretary at this point. So he'd be responsible for his own prosecution. MI5, have a file on Thorpe, you know, an inch thick with all these.

Because Scott has been telling everybody. Scott has been going around London, writing letters to people and telling people and buttonholing them and saying, Jeremy Thorpe was my lover and he has betrayed me and he's got my national insurance card. Is Edward Heath not aware of this? I think, you see, most politicians think this is just completely mad. They don't believe Scott.

They think Scott is making it all up. They know that Thorpe is gay, but they don't think, you know, that the Scott stuff really amounts to anything. They think it's just because at that stage, it doesn't really amount to anything. I mean, it's, you know, it almost reflects well on them. You could say they don't think this debars Thorpe completely from, you know, it almost reflects well on them. You could say they don't think this debars thought completely from, you know, polite society. They just think, well, Jeremy, everybody knows he's got a rackety private life.

It's completely unfair that this guy is making his life a misery. Let he who is not plotted to kill his boyfriend by throwing him to an alligator in Florida cast the first stone. They don't know that that stage this has happened. So February 19th, March 1974, Thorpe has these coalition talks and they don't work out. So he doesn't go into government. Instead, Harold Wilson comes back, a Labour leader, and he becomes prime minister.

Then there's a second election in October 1974. Thorpe is on 20% of the vote in February and he's hoping for a big breakthrough in October. And his big strategy, well, not his big strategy, that's an exaggeration, but one of his gimmicks is he's going to hire a hovercraft and travel around the southwest in this hovercraft. Because hovercraft conveys a sense of...

Modernity. Future, modernity, white heat of technology. When Britain is in a shambles in 1974, you've got IRA bombs going off in pubs, inflation is through the roof, trade union is out on strike. If you've got a hover going off in pubs inflation is through the roof trade union is out on strike if you've got a hovercraft that shows you own the future it's kind of doctor who your future and the hovercraft breaks down it does British made hovercraft or something it's like breaks down a thought has to wade ashore in the eyes of the press and his campaign kind of goes

similarly you know people have had their fun kind of voting for the liberals earlier in the year but now it becomes a much more of a choice i think um between labor and the tories the liberal vote dips and there's a sort of sense of a deflated balloon and it's round about this point that i mean i'm not entire i don't think anyone is entirely sure of the precise chronology because of course it's disputed but it's about this point that basically they're pressed go on the murder plan and not surprisingly because Thorpe thinks I've got it all to lose now you know I'm in the big league and I can't have Scott hanging

around we've just got to get rid of him so it's at that point that and I've actually made a chart to remind myself because it's so... I think this is a first I think you know we've done all these topics and I don't think we've ever had a chart before.

No, so I've got... Listen, this is a first. Dominic is unveiling the first The Rest Is History chart. So what happens? Thorpe gets... He says to Holmes, his mate, the aptly named Holmes, he says, you have to sort this out now. You have to kill Norman Scott.

He's still pestering me with his letters, his bloody national insurance demands, and I want to be prime minister. So Holmes, pestering me with his letters, his bloody national insurance demands. And I want to be prime minister. So Holmes, he's never arranged a hit in his life. He's never arranged anything even vaguely approaching. I mean, which of us has? So he enlists the help of a carpet salesman from South Wales who he knows.

I don't know if the world of selling carpets is particularly violent in the 70s. But this guy is called John LeMessurier. Okay, which to anyone who's watched Dad's Army, the actor John LeMessurier plays Sergeant Wilson. He is, who was one of the big stars of the British small screen in the 70s. But it's not him. It's somebody else with the same very uncommon name.

John LeMessurier says, well, he doesn't know anything about arranging murders, but he knows a man who might, who's a man called George Deacon, who supplies fruit machines to pubs and hotels. So, you know, slot machines, basically. Now, the slot machine world was actually, you know, no place for kind of shrinking violence. There was a lot of corruption, and there were slightly shady elements to the slot machine world was actually you know not no place for kind of shrinking violence there was a lot of corruption and it was there were slightly shady elements to the slot machine world so this

is not entirely ridiculous so now we've got a few stages away from thorpe deacon i think he approaches him in the pub or something he he then finds a prospective hitman this man is a man called andrew or gino as he called himself gino Newton. Newton, he's not an ideal assassin because he's never shot anybody. And he's actually an airline pilot. But basically, he says, I'll do it. You know, I'll do it. And they say they'll pay him £10,000, I think it is, which is a lot of money. His salary is £6,000, right? Yeah, exactly. So that tells you how much money he's being offered. So later on, they said, oh, we never paid him to shoot him. We just paid him to blackmail him.

But as he pointed out, you wouldn't give me that much money if it was just for blackmailing him. You're giving me more than my salary as an airline pilot. And airline pilots are well paid. So he's going to do it. I mean, God knows why he said yes. Maybe he just needed the money. I mean, he says, I norman scott for you so in the autumn of 1975

he goes off to um uh sort of devon somerset sort of borderlands x more yeah minehead exactly and um he meets norman scott you know what his story is to lure norman scott now he says um somebody's trying to kill you. I'll protect you. It's very unimaginative. Very subtle. There's another hitman. Weirdly, Scott kind of goes along with it. And at one

point, Newton says to him, well, listen, let's go for a drive. Isn't that the odd thing that Norman Scott is a paranoid fantasist? Whose worst paranoid fantasies actually turn out to be true? Yeah, but also doesn't seem to is a paranoid fantasist whose worst paranoid fantasies actually turn out to be true. Yeah, but also doesn't seem to... A paranoid fantasist who doesn't recognise

when the hitman finally pitches up. Yeah. So Newton says, I'll take you on a drive. It's from a place called Coomartin to a place called Porlock, so it's kind of over Exmoor. And Newton is thrown at the outset of the journey because Scott has brought his dog with him, who's this

great Dane called Rinker. They set off and Newton is really nervous. I mean, you'd be nervous anyway. You're going to kill somebody and you've never done it. He's got an antique Mauser pistol, a German kind of wartime pistol. And he's allergic to dogs or something. He has a horror of dogs. Yes. So Scott has brought

his dog. And Newton is, you can imagine driving the car over the bloody moorland, pitch black, probably raining. And of the Baskervilles. There's his dog. There's his dog. And you know you've got to kill this guy and probably the dog as well. And you've never shot, you know,

you've never killed anyone before in your life. He gets halfway and he sort of panics or something. Or there's some talk about swapping drivers and they pull over the dog assumes when they pull over that it's time to go for a walk and leaps out of the car so scott gets out after the dog and newton the hitman he gets out as well and he thinks christ i've got to do something so he just shoots the dog kills the dog i mean that's the that's something. So he just shoots the dog, kills the dog. I mean, that's the tragedy of the whole story. The dog is the real loser. Scott says, oh, my God, you've shot my dog.

What are you doing? What are you doing? Newton, I mean, this is an incredible detail now, Tom. He points the gun. He puts it to Scott's head and pulls the trigger. And nothing happens. The gun jams. So Newton then just gets back in the car and drives

off, which is ludicrous. I mean, at least try to batter him to death or something. Don't leave him there with the dead dog. That's what he does. So Scott has, you know, he's just been taken for a lift by this bloke who's shot his dog and then driven off into

the mist. And he comes to the only obvious conclusion. This has been arranged by Jeremy Thorpe. Which it has. Or has it? And then he goes around for the next few months basically making court appearances and telling everyone who will listen

I have been, you know, Jeremy Thorpe has tried to assassinate me. But presumably it sounds so mad that nobody believes him. Nobody believes it at all. Well, so how does it come, how does it come, I mean, how do people end up starting to believe him?

So just on nobody believing him, the government know about it. Harold Wilson knows about it. But Harold Wilson thinks he's being framed by the South African intelligence service who are called BOSS. Yes, okay. So we've got a question from Andrew Harrison. Were BOSS really involved? So this is the really weird aspect of this story. In the 1970s, everything had gone wrong for

Britain. And so there was this sort of general sense, weirdly, particularly among the people who should have known better, the top of the sort of governments and stuff, that this must be because of evil conspiracies by sort of shadowy intelligence agents and stuff. So Howard Wilson, who is the Labour Prime Minister, who we saw coming back to power in 1974, everything is going wrong for him. And he thinks he is being plotted against by MI5

and also by the South African Secret Service boss. I mean, who would call... what do you, why would you call your Secret Service BOSS? It's always as good as Spectre. Yeah, it's the Bureau of State Security, but even so, I mean, what a name. Anyway, he thinks BOSS is plotting against him. And so, Howard Wilson is saying to his cabinet ministers,

you're hearing all these rumours about Thorpe. They're all created by BOSS. BOSS are involved with this. And BOSS do, in fact, know about it they hate thorpe because he's been campaigning against apartheid but they haven't created this story they've just sort of picked it up and are delighted by it and hoping to use it against him so the way it starts to look more um uh the way people start to believe the thorpe story is that scott starts to give his letters to the newspapers.

He's got this cache of letters, you see. That's one of the big things. He's got the letters that show that he and Thorpe did have a relationship. But also Thorpe's old crony, Peter Bessel, who's moved to California, he starts talking to the newspapers as well. So now you've got a feeding frenzy, fleet street feeding frenzy as the newspapers are competing for ever more lurid allegations and one of the things that makes this story very hard to assess is we don't know and we'll never know how much some of these anecdotes have been concocted to sell you know by the people telling them to sell papers for example the line it's no better than

shooting a sick dog yeah i think bessel made that up because it was such a great line and he could you know the telegraph or the mail or whoever it was would run with them but i mean it's a kind of intriguing reminder of the pre-internet era that it takes this long to spill out yeah yes now it would all be out in a couple of hours wouldn't it yeah so it does take a very you're're right, it takes a very long time. So the sort of attempted murder is the autumn of 1975. But then it's not till May 1976 that Thorpe steps down as leader of the Liberal Party, because the Sunday Times had printed some of his letters to Norman Scott. And then the case rumbles on for a few more years.

And there's kind of revelation after revelation, this slow drip, drip, drip in the newspapers. And the other thing that I should have mentioned is that one of the key people in pushing the story, who's another great character who actually didn't really appear so much, I think, in a very English scandal, is the satirist Oberon Waugh. So he's Evelyn Waugh's son, the son of the Bridesmaid revisited novelist.

He lives down in the West Country, doesn't he? He lives in the West Country. He knows of Thorpe. And he writes a diary for Private Eye magazine in which he makes stuff up. So he writes this incredibly reactionary diary in which he sort of says, I went to dinner with Princess Margaret last

night and we agreed that all strikers should be shot on sight, or something of this kind. But in the course of his diary over the 70s, he has a real vendetta against Thorpe. I mean, he just calls himself a vendetta. He says Thorpe is a hypocrite and a liar. He has disgusting and revolting personal habits. And he's particularly upset about the killing of Rinker.

Yeah. So when he hears about the dog, he says, this just confirms everything I've ever suspected about Thorpe. Thorpe is a dog murderer. And really, I mean, in England, there could be no worse accusation than a dog murderer. That's the thing. The killing of the dog rather than...

If it was Scott who was murdered, it wouldn't be such a good story. No. It's a better story because it's the dog, Rinker, the innocent dog who is killed. So before all this time, the sort of Crown Prosecution Service or whatever they were in the 70s are sort of amassing information. They decide they are going to charge Thorpe, Holmes, the fruit machine man, George Deakin, the carpet salesman, LeMessurier, the airline pilot, Newton.

They're going to charge them all with conspiracy to murder. But that doesn't happen until after the next general election, the 1979 general election. So that gives Auburn War, the satirist, the chance to stand against Thorpe. Running for the dog party. Yeah, the dog lover's party. Dog lover's party, with its slogan, a better deal for your dog. A better deal for your dog. So his election manifesto was suppressed by law because the judge said it would be prejudicial to the trial because Auburn War was campaigning for dogs and against Thorpe. He said dogs had had a very bad deal in Britain.

Thorpe had been going around killing them. And the judge wouldn't let him publish. So he won 79 votes, war. And Thorpe loses, doesn't he? But actually by a surprisingly small amount, considering... Yeah, there's tons of support for Thorpe in his local manner, as it were. And so on the theme of changing attitudes to homosexuality,

lots of voters don't seem to be worried about that at all. Well, Thorpe is married. thorpe has been twice married um so a lot of people i think didn't just didn't believe it and it's that weird thing tom where i think a lot of voters had formed an attachment to thorpe and they just simply refused to believe that he could have been guilty of any of the things that he was accused of but he loses yeah but he does lose he loses and then after the election which sees mrs satchel come to power um thorpe comes to trial with the three other conspirators in the high court yes right in the old bailey in the old bailey yeah and okay so so so because this is another aspect of Britain that has vanished completely, is the tradition of the comically reactionary,

out-of-touch judge. Lord Justice Cantley, was it? Yes. Lord Justice Cantley, yeah. Yes. Who basically presides over the case, and his summing up is so weighted in Thorpe's favour that Thorpe gets acquitted.

Yeah, have you got it there, Tom? I haven't, but famously it then gets parodied by Peter Cook, who's the, I mean, he's basically, he's the guy who funds Private Eye, part of Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. He was part of the Beyond the Fringe, kind of the great genius of British comedy. And he does this kind of almost pitch-perfect parody. Well, Canley had described Scott.

He'd said in his summing up, he'd said, Mr Thorpe, public servant of many years standing, Scott, scrounger, parasite, hypocrite, homosexual. And sort of, you know, he completely loaded the... As you say, Peter Cook does this absolutely brilliantly. Self-confessed player of the pink oboe, is the

flavor's phrase. Yeah, I mean, basically what he does is, the reason that's so good is that he basically intersperses with what Cantney genuinely had said. Yeah. Maybe that's one of the reasons why why maybe it's just middle age, but British comedy doesn't seem quite as funny these days. It's because judges aren't as funny.

There's nothing to kick. Establishment figures aren't as funny because back then the establishment really was the establishment and you could, whereas now the establishment is all down with the kids. So they're not as instantly amusing. Anyway. So great for Jeremy Thorpe. He gets acquitted but his his career his career is destroyed i mean he had to be acquitted i think tom because the prosecution case almost necessarily was quite flimsy it's all based on hearsay okay so here's a question for you from jonathan metzer the jury acquitted on

beyond reasonable doubt test but looking at all the evidence available and then then and now was thorpe probably guilty or innocent what do you think well i think the jury had to acquit because the one okay well that's not the question that's not the question no i'll just say one thing though they the the the witnesses the key prosecution witnesses it turned out that they would they under their deals with the newspapers they were due to get more money if the thought went down so i mean that obviously looks very yeah so they were due to get more money if Thorpe went down so I mean that obviously looks very yeah so they were okay but but that's not quite quite the the question so he maybe he had to be a critic because there wasn't the evidence or because people have been you know

tampering with the witnesses or whatever but do you think that Thorpe did sponsor an attempt to kill Norman Scott yes I do I think think he might not have really meant it. But I'll tell you what's the damning thing, Tom, which we haven't mentioned at all, and this is a chance for me to drop a favourite fact in. Thorpe, it's the fact that he gets the money. So he gets the money, he raises the money, from a man called Sir Jack Haywood,

who's a British millionaire who's based in the Bahamas but a donor to the Liberal Party. Who's the chairman of Woolsey? from a man called Sir Jack Haywood, who's a British millionaire who's based in the Bahamas, but a donor to the Liberal Party. Now, some listeners... Who's the chairman of... He becomes the owner of Wolverhampton Wanderers in the 1990s. So Jack Haywood gives him this money, basically no questions asked. Thorpe doesn't give it to the Liberal Party funds. He keeps it in a separate account.

And as often in these cases, you follow the money. The reason he needs that money is because that money is destined for Andrew Newton, the hitman. And I think that's the really dodgy thing. That's the smoking gun. Yeah, exactly. And I think actually, Tom,

you know, you can understand why Thorpe, I mean, you can think Thorpe feels trapped. He's got this liaison in his past that he feels he can never rid himself of that fear of being exposed for his sexuality yeah and he feels he has to do something and whether he said it first as a joke or whether he really meant it i i think when it's happening at so many removes it probably never really seemed real to him oh just get rid of him i i was 11 i think uh yeah i was 11 and i had a vague sense of what was going on and i wasn't entirely sure what jeremy thorpe exactly was supposed to have done but i kind of vaguely

knew that it was it was something bad and we have um a comment here from uh tony mcgowan um opening batsman and the authors um a little bit older than me i should say i hope you'll be mentioning the terrible jokes that went around every school in the wake of the scandal e.g what happened when jeremy thorpe found norman scott stowing away on his yacht he made him work his passage so so there was there was the trial cake kind of provided grist for schoolboy jokes like that and there was a kind of you know the tradition of british smut of innuendo of anti-gay jokes i mean this yeah it kind of powered that particular mill and then there's a very interesting very interesting comment from pat roberts i first heard the word homosexual with regard to thorpe i was about nine the word bimbo with regard to

gary hart and about a sexual practice i won't mention with regard to bill clinton do political scandals give permission to the respectable media to talk dirty so it basically gives permission to school children and to the media to deal in kind of smutty subjects that otherwise perhaps back in the late 70s people were more restrained in talking about than perhaps would be now I think the good example of that is the very existence of the news of the world newspaper now defunct which in the sort of 50s 60s 70s you know at the weekend on Sundays the news of the world newspaper now defunct which in the sort of 50s 60s 70s you know um at the weekend on sundays the news of the world always had stories about philandering vicars or you know people caught in compromising situations and you're right it's kind of purience to it but it was always an excuse to tell sort of titillating stories and stories

about wrongdoing and i think thought the thorpe scandal was the consummate example of that. But also, I think why it really matters is because in the 1970s, there was a sense of decrepitude in British politics, a sense of establishment seediness. And this was precise. I mean, the big winner was Margaret Thatcher. You know, unimpeachable private life, a woman, sort of projected it's the same thing as with the profumo scandal in the the early 60s yeah exactly put paid to the macmillan

government gave it the kind of aura of shabbiness and decrepitude exactly and thorpe is a consensus politician he's a politician of that post-war sort of slightly social democratic consensus and that's what margaret thatcher in 1979 the year that he's tried that's what she says she wants to smash and it's very telling you know the tourists had lost in 1974 because so many of their voters something like two million of their voters are defected to the liberals those voters return in the year of the thought trial to margaret Thatcher and they give her the the impetus that she needs to go and sort of change everything in the 1980s I mean I thought what what Hugh Grant's portrayal of of Jeremy Thorpe powerfully conveyed was the charm and the wit and the the kind of

debonair qualities and there's um Ian Jones has given a transcript of an interview between Robin Day, the great inquisitor of the 70s and 80s, interviewing Thorpe on losing his North Devon seat at the 1979 general election. Robin Day, Mr. Thorpe, do you think your prosecution for conspiracy to murder was a factor in your defeat? To which Thorpe replies, put it like this, Robin, I don't think it helped. Yeah. Well, Thorpe was really funny. I mean, Thorpe would do a thing. I'm obviously a very charismatic man would do a thing

that you never see on political panel shows so he would appear on a panel show and and then he would impersonate the other the other people we don't have enough politicians doing that no politicians don't do enough impersonations okay so um i mean i think that that basically covers it because it didn't really have an enduring influence, an enduring impact. I mean, it's a kind of interesting waymark. As you say, it kind of signals the end of a particular period in British politics and the beginning of a new one. It's also, as we said, an interesting waymark in the kind of evolution of attitudes to homosexuality. And of course, it's the most famous assassination of a dog in British history.

We had a lot of questions about dogs, Tom. We did. And since this was Ian Keighley's idea that we do, I think we should, yeah, Paul Keighley, sorry.

I think we should end with a question that he's, he's asked. And has the assassination of a dog in this case, poor old Rinker ever had such reverberations in public life? I haven't, I haven't made a special study of dogs when i got that question i threw my hands up and put it out and we've had a number of of excellent replies so we've had one from um dunlick dunlin temink who suggests gellert and that's a great story of um gellert was theound of Llewellyn the Great in Wales who came back to find his child's cradle had been turned over. The baby itself had vanished. And there was Gellert, his dog, with blood kind of dripping from its chops.

And so Llewellyn assumes that Gellert has has killed the baby. He kills the hound. The hound gives a kind of faithful, trusting yowl and then keels over and well and goes next door and finds the baby well and alive and a dead wolf that gellert has killed wow that's a good story that's a great story um it's a good story then chris hind lincoln's dog lincoln's dog was called fido it survived the assassination of lincoln. And then he got assassinated by a drunk shortly after Lincoln's funeral. Assassinated? Could you assassinate? Yes, of course.

If it's Lincoln's dog, you can assassinate. Yes. Dave Walters, the story, I think actually, which we've touched on before, stray dog did cause a war. The war of the stray dog was a Greek-Bulgarian crisis in 1925, which resulted in a brief invasion of Bulgaria by Greece near the border town of Petric after the killing of a Greek captain, chasing the dog, and a sentry by Bulgarian soldiers.

And then we have Paul Dubbs. Sir Richard Sharples was assassinated in 1973 in Bermuda, along with his ADC, Hugh Sayers, and his dog, Horser. So there are some famous dogs. I think we should end. I don't know about dead dogs, but I know about a lost dog that was important.

It's both a nod back to a previous podcast and anticipating a future podcast. So the late Adolf Hitler had a dog when he was in the trenches in the First World War. And he was friendlier with the dog than with any of the fellas in his sort of platoon or whatever. And he became very close to this dog. And eventually they were told to move down the line.

And the dog had gone off for a walk or something and Hitler couldn't find it. And they moved down and he never saw the dog again. And his comrades said they never saw him as upset as he was after the loss of that dog. Now, the reason I say it's a nod to a future podcast is when I was writing my children's history of the Second World War, in the first chapter I introduced Hitler as a character and I had this stuff about Hitler and the dog and I'd written it in a very

tear-jerking way and at this point I hadn't, I don't think I'd said that Hitler was going to be the baddie or something and my son read it and when he saw the stuff about the dog, I mean he didn't care about the deaths of all these people in the First World War but when he read about the dog going missing you know, his sort of lip quivered and then he said to me, is's the person with the dog, Hitler.

And I said, yeah, it is. And he said, oh, well, you can't have the dog because any child reading this book will think that the lost dog, that must be the hero. And so I had to take the dog out. I had to cut it. I had to cut it completely because no villain would ever have a dog

in a children's book. It's interesting. I mean, so, so we, we're going to be, um, uh, recording an episode next week, uh, on children's history. Um, and I think, you know, we've, we've been talking about dogs. We've been talking about children's history. Um, and we've also been talking about the contribution of our listeners. And I'd like to just fade out by a wonderful conversation that our Magna Carta episode inspired. So we had some criticism from Dano about that.

A bit of a rant after listening to the Magna Carta episode of The Rest of History the other day. Feel free to argue with me. I will not defend John. He was a bad king, and by the sound of it, a bad person. But, and so Dano goes on with his thread. Yeah. But we then have a comment from Goalie X,

who says, what about the fact that his chief advisor was a snake to which dano you know huge credit to dano he says okay that i will grant you is a bad look yeah and i think that that's that's the measure of our of the people who are listening to us is that they can disagree but they do it amicably yeah if you don't believe king john's advisor was a snake just google it yeah absolutely so i think on that note um dominic thank you for a tour de force uh a brilliant explication of um the jeremy thorpe scandal thank you to paul paul keely for suggesting after coming up with it and i hope that our um those listeners who'd never heard of the jeremy thorpe scandal will feel that it was well worth doing an episode on so we will speak to you soon thanks very much for listening bye-bye bye-bye

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