Unsolved mysteries · People & lives

Acquitted of everything, and finished by the trial anyway

Jeremy Thorpe led Britain's Liberal Party through its most hopeful postwar years, only to see his career destroyed by a scandal involving the attempted murder of his former lover. Born into a political family and drawn to the Liberals partly through his admiration for David Lloyd George, he won the North Devon seat in 1959 and built a reputation as a witty, telegenic campaigner. Elected party leader in 1967 after a tight vote among just twelve MPs, he steered the Liberals to their best postwar result in February 1974, winning six million votes but only fourteen seats under first-past-the-post. That result left him holding the balance of power in a hung parliament, and he turned down Edward Heath's offer of a cabinet post because the Conservatives would not commit to electoral reform.

Behind this public rise, Thorpe was concealing a secret relationship with Norman Scott, a former stable hand who later claimed Thorpe had seduced and then mistreated him. Over the 1960s and early 1970s Thorpe and associates tried repeatedly to silence Scott, paying him off and eventually, prosecutors alleged, hiring a pilot named Andrew Newton to kill him. The plot ended in farce in 1975 when Newton instead shot Scott's dog on a Devon moor, and the ensuing scandal forced Thorpe to resign the leadership in 1976 as press and police interest intensified. He lost his parliamentary seat in the 1979 election just before standing trial at the Old Bailey alongside three co-defendants on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder. He chose not to testify, and despite damaging testimony from former colleague Peter Bessell and a scornful judicial summing-up aimed at the prosecution witnesses, he was acquitted on all counts.

The acquittal did not restore his standing, and Thorpe never returned to frontline politics, failing in bids for various public roles and watching Parkinson's disease curtail his activity from the mid-1980s onward. He remained largely out of view for decades, occasionally resurfacing to comment on politics, and died in 2014 at eighty-five, not long after his wife Marion. Later assessments have tried to balance the scandal against his record as an internationalist and campaigner against apartheid and racism, while debating how much substance lay behind his undeniable charisma. His double life as a closeted gay politician in an era when homosexuality was illegal has also drawn renewed attention, framing the affair as much as a story of concealment as of ambition. The saga has since been retold in books and a television dramatisation, cementing Thorpe's reputation as a cautionary tale rather than the Liberal revivalist he hoped to be remembered as.

He was the son and grandson of Conservative MPs, yet tied his career to a Liberal Party then small and in decline.

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