Thorpe affair
[1] Political figures were particularly vulnerable to exposure; William Field, the Labour MP for Paddington North, was forced to resign his seat in 1953 after a conviction for soliciting in a public lavatory.
When Ian Harvey, a junior Foreign Office minister in Harold Macmillan's government, was found guilty of indecent behaviour with a Coldstream Guardsman in November 1958, he lost both his ministerial job and his parliamentary seat at Harrow East.
[6] Rejecting his Conservative background, he joined the small, centrist Liberal Party—which by the late 1940s was a declining force in British politics, but still offered a national platform and a challenge to an ambitious young politician.
[22] He began to evidence the kind of behaviour which a journalist would later summarise as his "extraordinary talent for wheedling his way into people's sympathy before turning their lives to misery with his hysterical temper-tantrums.
[28] Aware that exposure as a gay man would end Thorpe's career, Bessell became his self-appointed protector, even to the extent, he later said, of falsely claiming to be bisexual, as a means of acquiring his friend's confidence.
He was penniless, homeless and, worse, had left Vater's employment without the National Insurance card which, at that time, was essential for obtaining regular work and access to social and unemployment benefits.
He paid for advertisements in Country Life magazine, in an effort to find work with horses for his friend,[40] arranged various temporary jobs, and promised to help Josiffe to realise an ambition to study dressage in France.
[45] He moved back to England, and eventually found a job at a riding school in Wolverhampton, where he stayed for several months before his erratic behaviour proved too much, and he was asked to leave.
[55] Bessell warned Josiffe of the consequences of attempting to blackmail a public figure, but in a more conciliatory vein promised to help recover the missing luggage and insurance card.
[60][n 3] To resolve Scott's immediate problems, and to prevent a resumption of his tirades against the new party leader, Bessell began paying him a "retainer" of between £5 and £10 a week, ostensibly in lieu of lost national insurance benefits.
[62] Thorpe's leadership of the Liberals was not, initially, an unqualified success; his local campaigning skills did not readily transfer to set speeches on national or international issues, and some sections of the party became restless.
He had led the party to a disastrous performance in the general election of June 1970; in an unexpected victory for the Conservatives under Edward Heath, the Liberals lost seven of their thirteen parliamentary seats, and Thorpe's majority in North Devon fell to below 400.
[24] Thorpe faced censure for his conduct of a campaign during which he had spent extravagantly and left the party on the verge of bankruptcy; but the matter was put aside in a wave of sympathy when his wife Caroline was killed in a road accident 11 days after the election.
He had shown Gleadle his dossier of documents; the doctor, without Scott's knowledge or consent, sold the papers to Holmes, who had assumed the role of Thorpe's protector after Bessell settled permanently in California in January 1974.
[88] In their analysis of the case, the journalists Simon Freeman and Barry Penrose state that Thorpe probably formed the outline of a plan to silence Scott early in 1974, after the latter's re-emergence became a matter of increasing concern.
[99][102] On 12 December 1975 Private Eye included another short teasing piece by Auberon Waugh which ended: "My only hope is that sorrow over his friend's dog will not cause Mr Thorpe's premature retirement from public life".
[109][n 5] Thorpe's difficulties increased when Bessell, fearing for his own position and perhaps scenting the possibility of making money, changed his stance and confessed in the Daily Mail on 6 May that he had lied to protect his former friend.
Barry Penrose and Roger Courtiour, collectively known as "Pencourt", had originally been hired by Wilson after his retirement, to investigate the former prime minister's theory that Thorpe was a target of South African intelligence agencies.
[118] On 2 August 1978 Thorpe participated in a House of Commons debate about the future of Rhodesia,[119] but thereafter played no further active part in parliament, although he remained North Devon's member.
[82][130] Private Eye's Auberon Waugh, a West Country resident and close follower of the case, mocked Thorpe by standing in the North Devon constituency as a candidate for the "Dog Lovers' Party".
[132] To conduct his defence Thorpe engaged George Carman, who had established a criminal law practice on the Northern Circuit in Manchester; this was his first high-profile national case.
[133] Carman undermined Bessell's credibility by revealing his financial interest in Thorpe's conviction: his newspaper contract provided that in the event of acquittal, only half the £50,000 would be paid.
[135] The judge left no doubt as to his own low opinion of Bessell's character;[136] Auberon Waugh, who was writing a book on the trial, thought that Cantley's general attitude to other prosecution witnesses became increasingly one-sided.
[138] Deakin was the only defendant to testify; the others all chose to remain silent and call no witnesses, believing that, based on the testimonies of Bessell, Scott and Newton, the prosecution had failed to make its case.
[141] The judge was scathing about the principal witnesses: Bessell was a "humbug" whose contract with The Sunday Telegraph was "deplorable";[143] Scott was a fraud, a sponger, a whiner, a parasite—"but of course he could still be telling the truth.
[161] In June 1981, in a series of articles printed in the News of the World, Holmes reasserted his allegation that Thorpe had asked him to kill Scott: "The incitement charge which Jeremy faced was true, and if I had gone into the witness box I'd have had to tell the truth.
[154] In December 2014, Scott, then aged 74, was reported to have recently relocated from Devon to Ireland,[167] although John Preston, in his 2016 account, places him "in a village on Dartmoor ... with seventy hens, three horses, a cat, a parrot, a canary, and five dogs.
"[168] In a BBC investigative documentary broadcast in December 2014, an antique firearms collector named Dennis Meighan claimed that he had been hired by an unidentified senior Liberal to kill Scott, for a fee of £13,500.
[175] In 2016, approximately a year and a half after Thorpe's death, Viking Press published A Very English Scandal, a true crime non-fiction novel about the affair by journalist John Preston.
[176][177] In May 2018, BBC One broadcast a three-part television miniseries adaptation of the book, written by Russell T Davies, likewise titled A Very English Scandal, directed by Stephen Frears and starring Hugh Grant as Thorpe and Ben Whishaw as Scott.
