It was with great surprise that I discovered Jeremy Thorpe had died just days before my book was rushed to the printers, though the manuscript had been completed some 20 years earlier. My publishers have since assured me that the timing is coincidental and in no way connected to legal matters that may have arisen had Jeremy been alive. Any delay that might have occurred was entirely due to my publishers’ tireless and painstaking search to find a senior member of the Liberal Democrats who was willing to write a foreword paying tribute to the man most responsible for reviving the political fortunes of the Liberal party in the 1960s and 1970s.
Jeremy was born in 1929, the son of Ursula and Thorpey Thorpe, neither of whom had quite as much money or talent as the other believed. My research has also led me to believe that Thorpey was bisexual, while his two brothers were practising homosexuals. Ursula was an extremely domineering woman who also had several close relatives who were homosexuals. Though homosexuality was commonplace among the upper classes at that time, none of Jeremy’s school friends detected any overt signs of homosexuality in his early flamboyance.
Having graduated from Oxford with a third-class honours degree, Jeremy embarked on what would prove to be an unsuccessful career at the bar. Although he relished the opportunity to show off in court, he found the audiences unresponsive and longed for a larger stage on which to display both his wit and his dandy-ish suits that were at no time considered by anyone to be homosexual. His natural inclination towards fair-mindedness, along with an insatiable desire to associate himself with people better connected than him, drew him inevitably towards the Liberal party and in 1959 he was elected member for North Devon.
I must now turn to what can only be called Jeremy’s tendencies. To be blunt, by the time Jeremy entered parliament he was embarking on a striking number of homosexual encounters. Had he been content to restrict his activities to like-minded members of the upper classes, then he could have buggered away to his heart’s content, like many other MPs. Unfortunately, Jeremy had a fatal attraction to risk that drew him to seek pleasure from rent boys and members of the lower orders. Frequently, he would nip out from the chamber in mid-debate to commit sexual acts with strangers behind the speaker’s chair. Hmm, I can feel myself getting all hot and bothered as I write. Not to say, disturbingly semi-tumescent.
Jeremy was a strikingly successful MP, though many (me) felt that his interest in African affairs was primarily down to the opportunities to get his hands on hard-bodied black men. His enthusiasm for the cut and thrust of politics helped the Liberals to their best ever result in March 1966, when a landslide vote saw the party increase its number of seats from six to nine. The following year he became the party leader.
Regrettably, I must now return to what can only be called Jeremy’s edge. Despite having married Caroline, he refused to rein in his homosexual activities and, to compound matters, the accusations that he had raped Norman Josiffe, later Scott, notwithstanding the liberal application of Vaseline, refused to go away, no matter how much money Thorpe and some of his chums threw at it.
Thorpe was a good party leader by and large. In 1974 he almost joined the Conservatives in a coalition, but decided against it.
Dear oh dear. I find I have now been dragged back to the Homosexual Scott Affair and must repeat the details at even greater length. Poor, poor Rinka the dog! Cruelly shot at dawn in the Dartmoor fog. Such sordid tales of deceit, blackmail, murder and conspiracy, set against a background of terrible shenanigans in the Liberal party. At the time it all felt horribly shocking. But we didn’t know about Cyril Smith, then. Well, some members of the Liberal party may have done, but that’s another story.
After Jeremy was acquitted at the Old Bailey in 1979, not very much happened. Then he died.
Digested read: Jeremy Thorpe – homosexual, politician and homosexual.
