Is Anything Happening?

by Lustig, Robin;

  Panic on the press benches.

  Suddenly, we realised that every word spoken, every salacious piece of evidence presented by the prosecution, could now be reported in all its glory. Thorpe’s name could be publicly linked to the alleged murder plot and the details disclosed. For a bunch of ‘colour writers’ who had expected to produce no more than some finely turned prose on the demeanour of the defendants, this was terrifying. Few of us possessed the shorthand skills necessary for accurate court reporting.

  For me, reporting only for a Sunday paper, the problem was not insurmountable. I could still turn in my colour piece as planned, relying, if necessary, on the dailies for any verbatim quotes. I also made sure to sit next to a man from The Times who had impeccable shorthand and was very happy to share the essential quotes during a break in the proceedings. Jostling with us for notebook space were such luminaries as the novelist and crime writer Sybille Bedford and the satirist Auberon Waugh, eldest son of Evelyn Waugh, who invited me to dinner one night, together with David May of the Sunday Times and Ronnie Payne of the Sunday Telegraph, at the Waugh family residence at Combe Florey, about twenty miles away. It was the closest I ever got to meeting my fictional journalist hero, William Boot.

  Court reporting for a Sunday newspaper is trickier than it might appear. All the best bits of the evidence have already appeared in the daily papers, so what is left is mainly colour and atmosphere. But even when reporting restrictions have been lifted there are still strict rules about what you can say while a case is under way, because nothing that appears in print must risk being held to interfere with the administration of justice. It would not be a good idea, for example, to say of a witness that he was ‘clearly lying through his teeth’, or that a defendant ‘looked guilty as hell’.

  So I edged as close to the limits as I dared. I reported that ‘the two Mrs Thorpes, wife and mother, sit stonily side by side’. I revealed that Mrs Deakin, wife of one of Thorpe’s co-defendants, ‘occasionally tries to relieve her evident boredom by reading a historical romance paperback’, and that the chief prosecution witness, Peter Bessell, ‘delivers his evidence in the manner of a company executive dictating a note for the record to his personal secretary’. The aim was to give readers a flavour of what it was like to be sitting in that courtroom, without risking that I would end up sitting in a prison cell.

  Once the case had been sent for trial at the Old Bailey, I got to work preparing a lengthy background piece on Thorpe, ready to be published once the trial was over. Like most of the reporters who had immersed themselves in the detail of the saga, I was confident that Thorpe would be found guilty, even though some of the prosecution evidence was not exactly rock-solid. I was much influenced by two of my sources who had been his contemporaries at Oxford, the editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, and the ballet critic Oleg Kerensky, grandson of the Russian Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky, who was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1917. When I interviewed each of them about their memories of Thorpe, I was shocked by the depth of their contempt for him. Even as an ambitious student politician, it seemed, he had earned himself a reputation for sharp practice, deceit and double-dealing.

  I also interviewed a former Conservative MP, Ian Harvey, who had resigned from Harold Macmillan’s government in 1958 after being arrested while having sex with a guardsman in St James’s Park and charged with gross indecency. One of the biggest mysteries of the Thorpe saga had been why such a senior politician would take such huge risks in his private life, whatever his sexual orientation but especially if he faced the risk of criminal prosecution. Harvey had no difficulty explaining the mystery: ‘The greater the risk, the greater the pleasure.’

  The Old Bailey trial opened on 8 May 1979 and it did not take long for Thorpe’s QC, George Carman, to blow a gaping hole in the credibility of the prosecution’s main witness, Peter Bessell, who had signed a contract with the Sunday Telegraph for the publication of his story once the trial was over. Fatally for the prosecution case, the contract specified that his fee would be doubled if Thorpe was found guilty, meaning, as Carman lost no time in pointing out for the benefit of the jury, that he had a clear financial interest in tailoring his evidence to make a conviction more likely.

  Carman was another of Thorpe’s Oxford contemporaries, and, according to Thorpe’s biographer, had helped Thorpe with his law essays in return for support at the Oxford Union. He also, although none of us knew it at the time, was leading as risky a private life as Thorpe had been: after his death in 2001, it emerged from a biography written by his son that he had a serious alcohol problem, was a wife-beater, addicted to gambling and, despite his three marriages, probably bisexual.42

  One of his main difficulties as Thorpe’s defence counsel was dealing with his client’s sexual orientation: it was an essential element in the case, given Scott’s insistence that they had had a physical relationship, but Thorpe had always categorically denied that he was gay. Carman’s solution to the problem was skilful and subtle, the result of a deal agreed with the prosecution to stop them calling a long line of witnesses who were prepared to give evidence about Thorpe’s secret sex life.

  During his cross-examination of Scott, Carman asked:

  You knew Thorpe to be a man of homosexual tendencies in 1961?

  Scott: Yes, sir.

  Carman: He was the most famous and distinguished person you had met at the time?

  Scott: Yes, sir, I think so.

  Carman: You were flattered that for a short time he introduced you into a different social world. I suggest you were annoyed because he did not want to have sexual relations with you.

  Scott: Of course that’s ridiculous, because he did.

  As Thorpe’s biographer pointed out, what Carman had managed to do, almost in passing, was leave the impression in the jury’s minds that ‘Scott was a predator who had accurately assessed Jeremy’s “weakness” at their first meeting and set out to exploit him’.43

  When it was the turn of the defendants to present their case, only one of them, George Deakin, chose to give evidence; Thorpe, Holmes and Le Mesurier all stayed silent. And when the judge, Mr Justice Cantley, gave his summing-up, before sending the jury out to consider their verdicts, he sounded to many of us on the press benches as if he was leaning heavily in one direction.

  The defendants, he said, all had an ‘unblemished reputation’. The evidence against Thorpe was ‘almost entirely circumstantial’, and although he might clearly have had a motive for wanting Scott disposed of, the existence of motive did not constitute proof. Cantley was not, however, conspicuously well-disposed towards Thorpe’s co-defendant George Deakin, whom he described as ‘probably the sort of man whose taste ran to a cocktail bar in his living-room’. The main prosecution witness, Peter Bessell, was an even lower form of pond life: ‘[he] told us he was a lay preacher at the same time as being sexually promiscuous. And therefore a humbug.’ Norman Scott was ‘a hysterical, warped personality, accomplished sponger and very skilful at exciting and exploiting sympathy’. The hitman, Andrew Newton, was ‘a highly incompetent performer for all his self-advertisement … capable of inventing an entirely false story … One must look at his evidence with great care.’

  The comedian Peter Cook famously parodied the summing-up in one, deadly sentence: ‘And now, you are to retire – as indeed should I – to consider your verdict of “Not Guilty.”’

  On 22 June, after two and a half days of deliberations, the jury duly returned their verdicts: they found all four defendants not guilty. It was a Friday, and their verdict presented me with a serious, immediate problem: much of the background article that I had spent so many months researching and writing was now unpublishable, for the simple reason that what can be said without fear of a libel writ about a man who has just been acquitted of a conspiracy to murder is very different from what can be said about someone who has been convicted. My article had already been set in type, so I sat down with the galley proofs watching a lawyer go through it paragraph
by paragraph.

  ‘You can’t say that … or that … or that … This bit’s all right … but not that … or that…’

  It was an excruciatingly painful process. All that work, all those words, wasted. What remained bore little resemblance to what I had originally written.

  It was like the slow unpeeling of a mask. Jeremy Thorpe’s face, which for most of his trial had been set in an unmovable frown, suddenly came to life … For the first time in 15 years [he] no longer had to worry about Norman Scott. The ordeal was over. For good.44

  I was not alone in my professional pain. Both the BBC and the commercial TV network LWT had to cancel their planned documentaries, the Daily Mirror dropped its plan to publish Norman Scott’s autobiography and, irony of ironies, the Sunday Telegraph cancelled its ill-advised contract with Peter Bessell.

  Within just a few weeks of the end of the trial, a highly unusual insight into the minds of the jurors was published in the New Statesman,45 which obtained an interview with one of them that had been conducted by two Guardian journalists, Peter Chippindale and David Leigh. (The Guardian had decided not to publish it on the grounds that it would probably lead to an action for contempt of court. Its caution was well-founded: the government did take action against the New Statesman, but lost. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, ruled that although it was important to uphold the principle that jury room deliberations should remain secret, this particular article ‘demonstrated that the jury had approached its task in a sensible and responsible manner’.)

  What the interview revealed was that the Bessell contract was a crucial factor in the jury’s decision to acquit. Bessell and Holmes were the only two sources who claimed that there had been a conspiracy to murder, but Bessell’s evidence was fatally tainted by his contract with the Sunday Telegraph, and Holmes chose not to give evidence. The jury were convinced, apparently, that there had been some sort of conspiracy, but they were not satisfied beyond reasonable doubt (the standard required in a criminal court) that it was a conspiracy to murder.

  Q: If the charge had been conspiracy to intimidate, or something like that, would you have convicted?

  A: Oh, undoubtedly, yeah. We was all certain of that.

  In 1981, Parliament passed a new contempt of court act that meant no future such jury interviews could be published. Under section eight it became an offence ‘to obtain, disclose or solicit any particulars of statements made, opinions expressed, arguments advanced or votes cast by members of a jury in the course of their deliberations in any legal proceedings’. Four days before the new act came into effect, The Observer published my account of two juries that I had sat on, in which I described in some detail – although without identifying the cases – the very different ways in which the two juries had arrived at their verdicts.46

  As far as I know, it was the last such article ever to appear in the British press.

  Fortunately, the Thorpe case now reads like a tragic tale from a very different era. Cabinet ministers and other MPs are now openly gay and a politician’s sexuality is no longer regarded as career-defining. Even when the Prime Minister is reported to have done unspeakable things with the head of a dead pig during his student days, the public reaction is one of mirth, perhaps of scorn, but there are no calls for his resignation. Thorpe spent his entire adult life pretending to be someone he was not, and becoming ever more desperate to prevent people from learning the truth. It destroyed his career and blighted the lives of dozens of his friends and political colleagues. So when I hear people lamenting the appalling iniquities of contemporary political life, I remind myself that not everything is worse now than it used to be.

  The Thorpe trial had been postponed to make way for an event that was to have a far more lasting effect on British politics than the downfall of the former leader of the Liberal Party: the 1979 general election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power and ushered in eighteen years of unbroken Conservative Party rule. It was a period during which Britain changed more fundamentally than at any time since the immediate post-war years that saw the establishment of the welfare state and the National Health Service. Nationalised industries were sold into private ownership, and a massive process of de-industrialisation was begun, resulting in the collapse of Britain’s coal, steel and ship-building industries. Revenues from North Sea oil paid for a programme of tax cuts for the better-off, and Thatcher’s supporters exulted that she had ‘made Britain great again’. That was not The Observer’s view, nor was it mine.

  For the three weeks of the 1979 election campaign, I was one of the team of journalists on the Thatcher campaign bus. To be strictly accurate, I was on one of the two campaign buses, because we drove round the country in convoy: the candidate and her team in one bus, with the ‘reptiles’, as her husband Denis referred to us, following close behind. We got so few chances to interact with her directly that, after a week of steadily mounting frustration, the travelling press wrote her a letter, signed by all of us, begging for a chance to actually talk to her.

  The first week of Thatcher’s campaign trail has been a success. Or rather it has achieved what it set out to achieve – plenty of pictures in the papers. So far, Mrs T has refused only two photographers’ requests: she does not enjoy kissing babies, and she very sensibly refused to hold a giant pair of scissors near her face…

  Smiling at cameras is one thing, talking to reporters is quite another. So far, we scribblers have had scarcely a ‘Good morning’ to call our own.47

  One evening, close to midnight, our wish was finally granted, and we were ushered into her hotel suite for an impromptu press conference. The main issue of the day was her party’s taxation proposals, a subject on which the Financial Times’s political correspondent Elinor Goodman, later of Channel 4 News, was both impressively knowledgeable and commendably insistent. Eventually, proceedings were brought to a close after Denis, in an audible whisper, had muttered to an aide: ‘Who is that dreadful woman?’

  I found Thatcher to be impressive and terrifying in equal measure. Her stamina left the rest us breathless with exhaustion; her certainties were absolute, her belief in victory unshakeable. (To be fair, there was little doubt in anyone’s minds that she would win, since the Labour government under Jim Callaghan had very obviously run out of steam.)

  ‘They call me a reactionary,’ she would say in every stump speech at town halls up and down the country. ‘Well, I am a reactionary, because there’s a lot to react against.’ And right from the word go, she made no attempt to disguise her approach to government: ‘I seek confrontation with no one, but you do not serve the cause of peace and social harmony by shrinking from such challenges.’

  As the nation’s coal miners were to learn soon enough.

  The 1979 Conservative Party campaign was a watershed: adopting techniques imported from the US, Thatcher’s handlers understood that what mattered above all was imagery. For the first time in British politics, the interests of the TV cameras were paramount. Hence, Thatcher cuddling a calf, Thatcher in a chocolate factory, Thatcher chatting to shoppers. We take it for granted now, but in 1979, it was a novelty.

  It was widely recognised that whichever party won the election would reap the full benefits of the North Sea oil bonanza that was just beginning. Yet there was little discussion of how the oil revenues should best be utilised. Nor, in the years that followed, was there much debate. As Ian Jack wrote in The Guardian more than three decades later:

  Oil’s failure to intrude into the public debate, particularly in southern Britain, had an important consequence. ‘Not fixing the roof while the sun shone’, the favourite Tory accusation against the Blair/Brown regime, held true in spades for the way oil receipts were spent in the Thatcher years.48

  For several years after I joined The Observer, I made regular trips back to Italy to report on more bomb attacks, the kidnap of a British businessman, Rolf Schild, and his family (the kidnappers had misheard his name and thought the family were Rothschilds), the uncovering of the shad
owy right-wing conspiracy P2, and the trial of a Scottish nanny who was alleged to have been an arsonist and, in the eyes of the excitable Italian press, a witch. Only a year after I joined the paper, Pope Paul VI died, setting in train, as papal deaths always do, a cumbersome and ritual-filled process to choose a successor. The conclave of cardinals who would elect the next pope began their deliberations on a Friday and in the full expectation that they would take a few days to reach a decision – three or four days is the norm – we ran a big double-page feature about some of the most favoured candidates.

  Just as the presses were starting to roll on the Saturday evening, a puff of white smoke was seen to emerge from the chimney of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, where the cardinals were meeting.

  Panic. White smoke meant they had chosen a new pope.

  But then the smoke turned black, signifying that no new pope had been elected.

  Confusion.

  Eventually, the senior cardinal in the conclave, Cardinal Pericle Felici, appeared on the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica to make the traditional Latin announcement: Habemus papam. We have a pope. It was wonderful news for the world’s Roman Catholics, but not such good news for the Sunday newspapers.

  Donald Trelford appeared at my desk. ‘Robin, you used to work in Rome, didn’t you? We need to scrap the centre pages and get a profile of the new pope for the next edition. Can you manage 1,000 words in the next twenty minutes?’ This was long before Google or Wikipedia, and there was next to nothing about the new man in the cuttings file. I did not quite manage the 1,000 words, so we had to run an extremely large photograph to fill the space.

  There was a postscript. A month later, my wife, Ruth, who likes to keep the bedside radio on for most of the night, woke me to tell me that the pope was dead. ‘I know,’ I replied. ‘He died weeks ago.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘The new one is dead.’