For months, a special Senate committee – with which Nixon and his staff refused to cooperate on the grounds of ‘executive privilege’ – had been investigating suspect presidential campaign activities before they finally stumbled across this archival goldmine. On 13 July 1973, Haldeman’s former deputy Alexander Butterfield was called before the committee and asked if recordings were ever made of the president’s conversations. ‘I was hoping you fellows wouldn’t ask me about that, I’ve wondered what I would say,’ he replied awkwardly. ‘Well, yes. There’s a recording system in the President’s office.’10 The next day a stunned committee staffer phoned Bob Woodward, a member of the Washington Post team who had been following the money to the heart of the conspiracy, to tell him: ‘Nixon bugged himself.’11
It took months to prise the tapes out of the president’s sweaty paws. The committee requested them; Nixon refused. The committee issued a subpoena; Nixon refused. The special prosecutor appointed by Elliot Richardson – who had become attorney general after Mitchell left to head up CRP in the spring of 1972 – asked the Supreme Court to order Nixon to hand the tapes over; Nixon ordered Richardson to sack the special prosecutor. Richardson refused, and resigned instead. His deputy wouldn’t comply either, so the president fired him too. Nixon eventually found someone willing to fire the prosecutor, but by then nearly half a million telegrams of protest were flooding into the White House and there were open calls for the president’s impeachment. In October 1973, Nixon agreed to hand over transcripts of the recordings; the Supreme Court ruled that he must make the actual tapes available by the following summer.
Despite a mysterious gap of eighteen and a half minutes during one crucial discussion, the tapes provided more than enough evidence to implicate Nixon in a cover-up. Not only that, but the full horror of the president’s psyche was revealed: in private he was a ranting, foul-mouthed racist and anti-Semitic drunk. After listening to some of the recordings, Nixon’s spiritual mentor, Reverend Billy Graham, burst into tears and threw up. The president became such a pariah that the British prime minister, Harold Wilson, ordered the Foreign Office to ‘take any measures open to us to ensure that Mr Nixon did not come to London’.12
Nixon, who had gradually fired more and more members of his inner circle as they became implicated in the scandal, himself finally resigned as president on 9 August 1974. Vice President Gerald Ford took over and granted his predecessor a ‘full, free, and absolute pardon’.13 Ford hadn’t been Nixon’s first, or even second, choice for the job – his VP candidate in both the 1968 and 1972 elections had been Spiro Agnew. But, in a considerable scandal of his own, he had been forced to resign from office the previous autumn after admitting tax evasion relating to the massive bribes he had taken as governor of Maryland.
The American people really had been spoiled for choice that year.
‘I wish, with all the emphasis which I can command, to deny that I was at any time engaged in any homosexual relationship with Norman Scott whatsoever, or that I was, at any time, a party to any homosexual familiarity with him.’
Jeremy Thorpe, statement to police, 3 June 1978
Whether or not former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe had been in a gay relationship with Norman Scott was never the most important issue. His trial at the Old Bailey, at which the jury took an incredible fifty-two hours to come up with a verdict of ‘not guilty’, was concerned with whether he had been part of a farcical conspiracy to murder Scott, along with a fruit-machine manufacturer, the owner of a carpet warehouse and an airline pilot who only succeeded in shooting Scott’s pet dog. Yet the full extent of Thorpe’s sex life, and the extraordinary risks he took not only with Scott but with other lovers too, finally emerged after his death in 2014, thanks to the diligent work of his biographer Michael Bloch, who agreed to sit on his manuscript for nearly a quarter of a century to comply with Thorpe’s ‘urgent insistence that it should not appear in his lifetime’.14
Jeremy Thorpe married twice, first to Caroline Allpass, who he told colleagues he hoped would provide ‘at least 5%’ boost in the opinion polls, and, following Caroline’s tragic death in a car accident, to Marion Lascelles, Countess of Harewood – a union that he boasted was ‘practically marrying into the Royal Family’.15 At the same time, he enjoyed a promiscuous gay sex life that he made little effort to hide, regularly introducing his conquests to colleagues and friends merely as youngsters from less fortunate backgrounds to whom he was acting as a kind of mentor. When he achieved celebrity as a television interviewer, he shocked colleagues with his approaches to handsome strangers on filming trips. His deliberately old-fashioned style of dress which he described as his ‘trademark’ soon made him instantly recognizable around the country, but he continued to haunt notorious gay pick-up joints in London’s Piccadilly. And after his election as an MP in 1959, he regularly used House of Commons notepaper to write romantic notes to other men – one of them, to a lover in San Francisco, was intercepted by the FBI, who tipped off the Foreign Office.
When Princess Margaret got engaged to Antony Armstrong-Jones in 1960, Thorpe even used a parliamentary postcard to complain to a friend that it was ‘a pity… I rather hoped to marry the one and seduce the other.’16 He claimed to have pulled policemen guarding Parliament and footmen attending at Buckingham Palace receptions, and by the time he was elected as Liberal leader in 1967 he was being blackmailed by a rent boy he had met on the King’s Road in Chelsea, a situation he could hardly complain about given that he had picked him up by asking, ‘Do you know who I am?’17 A scorned ex-boyfriend once turned up in the public gallery of the Commons shouting that Thorpe had jilted him. A man he had made an unsuccessful pass at provided full details not just to Thorpe’s own constituency association but to his local Conservative rivals too – just ahead of the 1966 election campaign. As Norman Scott put it in his evidence at the Old Bailey, ‘Jeremy Thorpe lives on a knife-edge of danger!’18
Thorpe first met Norman Scott at the Oxfordshire stables of a horse trainer friend in the summer of 1960. Scott, who was working there as a groom, was twenty and, as Thorpe told a friend, looked ‘simply heaven’.19 The MP told the groom that if he ever needed help or happened to find himself in London, he could always get in touch with him via the House of Commons. Scott wasn’t a constituent – Thorpe’s seat was in North Devon – but then that wasn’t exactly the sort of help either man had in mind. Despite this being their first and so far only meeting, Scott almost immediately started claiming an intimate, and sometimes a sexual, relationship with Thorpe to anyone who would listen, and offered as evidence a number of letters he had stolen from his trainer boss, who conveniently also had the first name Norman. It quickly became apparent that Scott was quite an unstable stable lad, and the following year he spent several months under compulsory detention in a psychiatric clinic being treated for what he later admitted were ‘delusions’.20 When he got out, he took Thorpe up on his invitation.
Thorpe was so delighted to see Scott that he took him home to meet his mother. By Scott’s account this was the night they first had sex, though the details of the event changed on the many, many occasions he subsequently shared them. Thorpe did, however, give Scott cash to set himself up in a flat in London and write letters authorizing him to order clothes on Thorpe’s account at his tailor and shirt maker, actions which he later claimed were merely evidence of a ‘close, even affectionate relationship’ rather than anything else.21
The two men continued to see each other regularly for more than a year, despite increasing evidence of Scott’s unreliability. When police wanted to interview Scott about a stolen coat, Thorpe insisted they come to his office at the House of Commons to do so and told them that he was ‘more or less a guardian’ to Scott, since he had ‘lost both parents’22 – which, unfortunately for Thorpe, was one of Scott’s numerous tall tales. Scott was not, as he claimed, an orphan who had been cheated out of an inheritance from his famous architect father after he died in a South American plane crash, or the i
llegitimate son of the Earl of Eldon, but a bloke from Bexleyheath whose parents were both still alive. Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when Scott was dismissed from two jobs Thorpe had managed to wangle for him.
Soon they had fallen out to such an extent that Scott told a friend he was going to get a gun, kill Thorpe and commit suicide. The friend was so alarmed that she called the police, and that was how in December 1962 Norman Scott came to make the first official complaint about what he called ‘my homosexual relations with Jeremy Thorpe’ – which, in that year, were still a criminal offence.23
Scott would spout off about those relations in public many times over the next seventeen years, to the decreasing shock of anyone listening. In this first case, Scott’s obvious flakiness as a witness meant that nothing was done other than to pass a report up to the assistant commissioner of the Met and on to Devon and Cornwall police, but biographer Michael Bloch reckons that by 1960 Thorpe’s sexual preferences were ‘fairly common knowledge’ in his constituency, and were mostly regarded ‘merely as another of his many eccentricities’.24
In 1965, after Thorpe’s attempt to pack Scott off to Switzerland ended in a huge row, Scott wrote to Thorpe’s mother to tell her about their affair; she simply passed the letter on to her son. But that was also the year in which Thorpe’s ill-advised dalliance became a full-scale cover-up. He arranged a meeting with Home Secretary Frank Soskice to discuss what he branded as nonsensical claims made by Scott to the police. Soskice assured Thorpe there was unlikely to be any further trouble so long as he avoided any more contact with the person Soskice charmingly referred to as ‘the creature’.25 To be on the safe side, Thorpe dispatched a fellow Liberal MP, Peter Bessell, to Ireland, where Scott was then living with another lover, to try to silence him with the promise of regular payments. This was not a clever move. It would cost him a lot of money over the years, have no effect in silencing Scott (who by this point was blaming his ex for his inability to hold down a job and everything else that had gone wrong with his life) and ensure that the gossipy Bessell passed the gory details on to a number of political colleagues.
Thorpe took the precaution of telling Caroline about Scott before he married her in 1968, though he maintained Scott was just a lunatic with a grievance rather than one of many men who had actually shared his bed. (He was seeing a twenty-two-year-old Buckingham Palace servant and continuing to pick up rent boys on the side even during their engagement.) Caroline apparently declared that it wouldn’t bother her even if Scott’s claims were true, and coped admirably when in 1969 the young man phoned their constituency home ranting about the loss of his National Insurance card, a regular obsession of his.
But still Thorpe felt he could not rest easy. According to Bessell, Thorpe first brought up the subject of permanently doing away with Scott in 1968, ironically telling him it would be ‘no worse than shooting a sick dog’.26 Another Liberal, party treasurer David Holmes, was brought into discussions about the possibility of killing the young man and dropping his body down a disused tin mine in Cornwall. Both Bessell and Holmes said they thought these were more fantasies by Thorpe than a concrete plan.
A further six years would pass before the attack that would eventually land Thorpe and Holmes in the dock at the Old Bailey (with Peter Bessell appearing as a prosecution witness). In the meantime Scott blurted more details of his sex life with Thorpe and the payoffs he had subsequently received to officials at the Department of Social Security, several social workers, a vicar, the doctor treating him for depression, the coroner conducting an inquest into the death of one of his friends, the Liberal chief whip David Steel, an internal party inquiry set up to investigate his claims from which he fled in tears, Devon and Cornwall police, a freelance journalist who touted the story round Fleet Street, and Thorpe’s Conservative opponent in the 1974 election – among others. In 1972 Scott moved to a cottage in Thorpe’s constituency and started telling anyone who would listen about their now decade-old dalliance. He even turned up at Thorpe’s home in a ‘totally hysterical’ state, which Thorpe’s new wife, Marion, dealt with in the most British way possible: she just said, ‘I don’t think he’ll see you,’ and then politely offered to help him reverse out of the driveway because he couldn’t manage it by himself.27
‘Everybody in the constituency knew about him and it didn’t make any difference because they thought he was a nut,’ David Holmes told the News of the World many years later. ‘In the end [that’s] the tragedy of the whole thing, because Jeremy needn’t have reacted.’28
But react he did. First he got Holmes to broker the purchase, for £2,500, of a cache of incriminating letters between Bessell and Scott regarding the retainer he had been paying and burned them.29 Since they were not the only copies, and Holmes’s use of a cheque provided a paper chain linking him to the transaction, this was perhaps his worst move yet. Then Holmes, along with the aforementioned fruit-machine maker and carpet merchant, came up with what they maintained was only ever a plot to ‘frighten’ Scott into shutting up. (The jury accepted this explanation.) Thorpe himself claimed he had no idea any of this was going on. But he did personally arrange for £10,000 of a donation from a wealthy Liberal supporter to be paid through a backchannel at around the same time, supposedly to keep some ‘irregular’ expenses off the books. The figure tallied with the amount an amateur hitman, Andrew Newton, later claimed he had been paid to shoot Scott.30
Famously, Newton failed. He came up with a bizarre cover story designed to appeal to Scott’s paranoia, approaching him in Barnstaple in October 1975 to tell him his life was in danger from an assassin who was on his way from, of all places, Canada. Several days later he picked Scott up, along with Scott’s Great Dane, Rinka, and drove the pair of them to Porlock, where he deposited them in a hotel bar for several hours. Finally he returned to collect them, drove to a remote lay-by on Exmoor, pulled out an ancient and unreliable Mauser he had borrowed from an old school friend who collected antique weapons, and shot… Rinka. Scott testified that Newton then started swearing loudly, ‘seemed to be having difficulty with the gun’, and drove off shouting, in top cartoon villain style, ‘I’ll get you.’31
It didn’t take the police long to trace Newton, and even less time after that to find the gun, which he had hidden in his mother’s shed. Charged with ‘possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life’, he came up with the story that Scott had been blackmailing him over some compromising photos; he also had made an arrangement with Holmes to keep Holmes’s and Thorpe’s names out of things in return for £5,000. Newton kept his word and was jailed for two years the following March.32
It was all undone by another trial entirely, that of Norman Scott for social security fraud. ‘I am being hounded all the time by people just because of my sexual relationship with Jeremy Thorpe,’ he announced to a stunned magistrates’ court in January 1976.33 Thorpe issued his only response through his solicitors. ‘It is well over twelve year since I last saw or spoke to Mr Scott. There is no truth in Mr Scott’s allegations,’ it read.34 But it was open knowledge in the Liberal Party that various go-betweens had been in operation during those twelve years, and Thorpe’s rival for the party’s leadership, Cyril Smith, was only too happy to say so to journalists. When Bessell tried to claim he had merely been handing over reams of his own cash to Scott out of charity, Smith exploded to the Daily Mirror that ‘someone is telling bloody lies.’35 When the paper revealed Holmes’s £2,500 purchase of Scott’s letters a few days later, Smith announced: ‘I have not been told everything known about the affair, even by members of my own party.’36 There is, you will note, a certain dark irony in Smith being the final exposer of Thorpe’s dishonesty about his sexual activities.
Thorpe tried to fight on, lying through his teeth to the Sunday Times that ‘the existence of a homosexual relationship’ and the idea that he ‘was acquainted with or involved in a correspondence between Scott and Bessell and that I knew of, or was involved in, the purchase of the lette
rs’ were both ‘totally false’.37 This prompted Bessell – who had lost his seat and was in severe financial trouble – to sell his story to the Daily Mail, which printed it under the splash, ‘I TOLD LIES TO PROTECT THORPE’. More bills which Thorpe had paid on Scott’s behalf during the period also emerged, along with an extremely embarrassing letter dating from 1961 which the MP had signed off ‘yours affectionately – Jeremy – I miss you’. In the body of the letter, Thorpe assured Scott that ‘Bunnies can (and will) go to France!’ – a phrase that was hard to spin as heterosexual banter.38
Thorpe finally resigned as Liberal leader in May 1976, complaining of a ‘campaign of denigration’ and a ‘sustained witch hunt’ by the press. ‘You will know that from the very beginning I have strenuously denied the so-called Scott allegations and I categorically repeat those denials today,’ he thundered.39 His lawyers started threatening journalists with the archaic, but terrifying, offence of criminal libel, which could see them put in prison. However, Thorpe’s determination to blame others for his own bad behaviour had managed to transform one loose cannon into three: Norman Scott, Peter Bessell and, when he was released from prison, Andrew Newton too. ‘I WAS HIRED TO KILL SCOTT’ was the headline on his story when he sold it to the Evening News the following October.
The case for conspiracy to murder finally came to trial in May 1979, after Thorpe successfully managed to get it postponed until after the general election, at which he had lost his seat. It was most notable for the extraordinary summing-up by the judge, Sir Joseph Cantley, in which he described Scott as a ‘hysterical, warped personality, an accomplished sponger… a crook, a fraud… a whiner, a parasite’, and generally implied he would quite like to have bumped him off himself.40 But with three prosecution witnesses – Scott, Bessell and Newton – forced to admit they had lied about the case in the past, it was not difficult for Thorpe’s barrister, a young George Carman, to pick holes in their evidence. Thorpe walked from court a free man, but his career was over. He had finally slipped off the knife-edge on which he had balanced for so long.
The Lies of the Land Page 11