Michael Bloch, Jeremy Thorpe (Little, Brown)
One of Michael Bloch's other biographies is of Ribbentrop. It seemed worth investigating how a great Liberal could be bracketed loosely together with a Nazi leader but perhaps they can. Ribbentrop, it seems, enjoyed life in rarified social circles, was credited with some knowledge of foreign affairs, accused of some superficiality in his expertise and his influence waned after a brief period in the limelight. So, there are parallels after all.
Bloch does an excellent job in putting together the detail of the rise, rise and fall of Jeremy Thorpe, hindsight allowing him to point out whenever small mistakes and then increasingly larger ones were going to be significant in the denouement of his story. One has the feeling quite often that one has read such a story before, it is familar from The Mayor of Casterbridge but Michael Henchard, having committed his first major error of judgement, doesn't continue to flirt with danger as he becomes more and more successful.
Jeremy Thorpe was a political hero of mine in a period when, unlike now, the world seemed to be improvable. Despite the reputation of the 1970's as a time of the three-day week, power cuts and unburied dead, it seemed as if progress was being made and many things we take for granted now were being achieved then. Thorpe was a progressive politician, internationalist in outlook and with genuinely moral ideas on social justice. He was also, however, a showman and self-promoter on a scale comparable with, if not surpassing, Boris Johnson, although with an elegance and style that the blond buffoon can't hope to emulate.
His ancestors included the remarkable overseas adventurer, Empire Jack, and an early ill-advised associate was the 'conspicuous and colourful' Henry Upton,
the gigantic and scandalous heir to Viscount Templeton (who had) fascinated him with his outrageous hedonism.
Among his many achievements, Upton is credited by Bloch with,
encouraging (Jeremy) to regard sex as an act of crude domination, and instilling a play-acting interest in violent fantasies
Thorpe, however, was not only a show-off but highly charismatic, who could appear to be a magician or conjurer, a flamboyant violin-player, whose diabolic good looks seem to suggest Paganini, and capable of charming and influencing many of those he needed to while there were from his earliest days at Oxford always some who were less impressed.
Having been President of the Oxford Union, he makes his way rapidly through the ranks of a Liberal Party in a parlous state in the 1960's to become leader at the age of 37 although his leadership election is a close run thing. In a bad advertisement for the Transferable Vote electoral system, he wins 6 votes from the 12 Liberal MP's, the other 6 being divided equally between the two other candidates whose votes all transferred to each other. It is only when those two pragmatically withdraw that Jeremy is elected.
The Liberal Party then was not so much a party but a motley collection of independents, with some right-wing 'liberals' (with Cyril Smith still to come), a devout Methodist and absentee MP's who spent most of their time working as barristers and there is much mention of 'taking silk' and being 'called to the bar' and so the book reads even more louchely when this coded language is added to the stories of Jeremy's consorting with all strata of society in pursuit of cheap thrills.
He enjoys bringing the Liberal Party to the brink of government in 1974 but the glamour and his place in the news headlines is always being undermined by having a difficult set of renegades to lead. He might only have 14 seats but he does have 6 million votes and the protracted discussions with Ted Heath end in an impasse that can't be squared with both Heath and the Liberal MP's.
Harold Wilson is a friend but not one for a political deal and after 1974, despite Jeremy's continued popularity in his constituency and the country, his main chance has effectively gone. And in retrospect, his failure to make a deal with Heath is blamed in no small part for the eventual succession of Margaret Thatcher.
But, all the time, Norman Josiffe (later known as Scott) is a volatile, petulant ne'er-do-well who won't go away after an alleged, and all but 100% established, affair with Jeremy from the early 1960's. The stable lad and male model is an unstable man and not a model of propriety who is being paid retainers by Jeremy's side but one who never makes a success of any number of jobs, opportunities and missions abroad. For Jeremy, it is a long sequence of reliefs that he has been dispensed with followed by the horror that he is back again in need of more money. Fantasy and reality begin to get tangled up with each other as it occurs to Jeremy that Scott might be made to vanish more permanently with no prospect of return, which is what of course later becomes a real if hideously bungled plan.
Bloch brilliantly describes the growing threat to Jeremy's public position, the accumulating pieces of evidence stored in various places, the desperation that leads to an absurd cast of self-seeking characters and how Jeremy's situation disintegrates bit by bit while he soldiers on with a succession of carefully-worded statements and often a still confident piblic demeanour.
At the trial, his erstwhile ally, Peter Bessell has a contract for his story with the Daily Telegraph that will be worth twice as much if Thorpe is convicted. George Carman takes the brief for the defence, who was to become the legal superstar of his day, for a fee much below anything he could have asked because he knows the case can make his name. That being a name that now brings with it asssociations that he,
as emerged after his death in 2001, was a drunkard, a wife beater and an addicted gambler.
But the judge at Thorpe's trial, Sir Joseph Cantley, is well-disposed to the establishment figure and disparaging to prosecution witnesses at every opportunity. The judge's name, as if from a novel, suggests he can't lie and he might not quite lie but, as Peter Cook was to remark at the time, he does direct the jury to go away to consider their verdict of 'not guilty'. Some aspects of the law relating to such trials were changed as a result of this seminal case.
After his acqittal, Thorpe loses his seat at the General Election that comes all too soon afterwards but he takes some persuading to give up on attempts to maintain a position in public life. He has seen the re-alignment of the centre that he could have been a part of, having had to step down as party leader, take place under Roy Jenkins, David Owen and David Steel and he eventually lives to see the Liberal Democrats achieve a place in government three decades later although it is not recorded what he thought of that.
Bloch's account is a tremendous, clear-sighted telling of a true story of human ambition and frailty, of its devious and unreliable nature, shifting stories and, as tellingly as any of the many threads in it, it is seen how Thorpe's attack on Harold Macmillan, when he attempts to save his own govenment, that,
Greater love hath no man than this, that he will should lay down his friends for his life
is duly quoted back with reference to Jeremy after he sells his old mates down the river during the trial.
It is a story worthy of Literature, whether Greek Tragedy, Shakespeare or Joe Orton and, as happens, if you were an admirer of Jeremy Thorpe, you still can't quite take against him. Late in life, struggling with Parkinson's Disease, he is warmly received back at Liberal meetings, his heroic second wife, Marion, with a musical pedigree going back to Schonberg, still beside him. Time is apparently a great healer and for all of the shabby double-dealing and cavalier machinations, Jeremy Thorpe had stood for hope, vitality and one still hears the Karelia Suite introducing a Liberal Party Political Broadcast from 1974 as if it was yesterday, as if anything was still possible.
