John Preston, A Very English Scandal (Viking)It is quite soon to be having another book on Jeremy Thorpe after last year's biography by Michael Bloch. They inevitably cover the same ground but whereas Bloch's was a life, and a compelling one, this new book concentrates on the court case. One also notes that John Preston writes for the Evening Standard and Telegraph, whereas Bloch was possibly more sympathetic (even if one wonders why he should be) and so one is aware that there might be differences in perspective.
Jeremy Thorpe was my favourite politician and so the news, as it was revealed, in the late 70's, was always difficult to take. I was more than ready to accept the story that it was all a South African plot to destroy the great Liberal hope and that Harold Wilson had been another target. Having wanted to believe that so much, that there is no evidence for it is also disappointing. No, however much one doesn't want to admit it, it is hard not to have to admit that Thorpe's redeeming qualities increasingly struggle to redeem him during the lurid story of duplicity, vaunting ambition and desperation.
One thing that I will still say for him is that he could have had a safe enough career as a Conservative but his brand of optimistic, reforming, pro-European Liberalism was apparently genuine. The Liberal revival that began with him continued for three more decades until the post-coalition debacle and that's the thanks you get for doing the right thing. Look how difficult it has been for George Osborne to put doctrinaire policies into action without the Liberal brake on his intentions.
In the first General Election campaign of 1974, the Liberals were led by the charismatic Thorpe, and made election broadcasts featuring larger than life (and most other things) Cyril Smith and flamboyant disc jockey, Jimmy Savile. And that was then regarded as an attractive line-up likely to gain votes.
It was always disappointing in those days to believe quite so fervently in the intrinsic goodness of the Liberal cause and yet to find them so often the butt, as it were, of so many jokes and off-colour remarks. But, as was explained in the Bloch book, the 12 Liberal M.P.'s were a disparate bunch of absentees in pursuit of careers at the bar, opportunists and some of them, including Smith unsuitably right wing. Perhaps they were more trivial than I gave them credit for but all the time, behind the news stories, this absurd shambles was gathering, with the needy Norman Scott never going away and Thorpe buying him off, forever thinking he's heard the last of him, becoming more manic in his plans to rid himself of that turbulent nuisance, but it was never to be.
There are graphic details I'm not going to repeat here. It's not supposed to be funny but sometimes maybe it is - not least, as I noticed, when Leo Abse, who has tried to bring some reforming acts before Parliament, tries to promote vasectomy as a way of preventing a population explosion and does so in a Private Members' bill (sic).
We find that the great Roy Jenkins' sympathy for homosexual equality wasn't quite as selfless as might have been thought because at Oxford it had been him and Tony Crosland. If one is in the market for further revelations of famous private lives then there is enough here to make you go in search of more about George Carman. But perhaps the highlight, and unlikely star of this motley cast, is the judge, Sir Joseph Cantley, an unworldly man especially when given the job of hearing such a trial, for who,
the idea that one man might give another flowers was one he hadn't come across before.
But, for any who had any doubt that the trial was an Establishment fix and travesty of justice, it is described here as equal but opposite to the discharging of the case against Captain Edmund Blackadder, on trial for shooting Melchett's beloved pet pigeon, by Stephen Fry's General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett VC DSO.
It is gripping because it is so farcical. One wants to have sympathy for someone and, as in a Hitchcock film, even though you know Thorpe is guilty, some of us still like something about him and might still be on his side despite all the evidence. How could it all have unravelled quite so spectacularly badly. Probably because Thorpe was an incorrigible risk-taker and, in this account at least, always expected someone else to get him out of trouble. Which, in the end, they do but it is at the cost of the career that once looked so promising, negotiating the terms of government with Ted Heath without consulting the rest of his party. But it was a position built on such unstable foundations that perhaps it was for the best that it never happened. Among other suitable metaphors for his story, the best might be the hovercraft used in the election campaign that was designed to float on air but actually sank.
For all the louche glamour, the elegant dress sense, the charisma and dash and sense of entitlement, it came to a sad end, a broken man still forlornly hoping for a peerage that could not be bestowed on him. It's a marvellous, terrible morality play, but more complete and more highly recommendable in Michael Bloch's version.
