What Rinka Wrought

Because of that murdered dog, Jeremy Thorpe, then leader of Britain’s Liberal party and Scott’s onetime lover, not only found his reputation in tatters, and his political future wrecked, but himself on trial at the Old Bailey for the attempted murder of a man he wanted silenced. Because the dog died, three of Thorpe’s co-conspirators also found themselves judged in the Old Bailey, and Thorpe’s close friend, a former Liberal member of Parliament named Peter Bessell, testified against him. Most astonishingly, because of the dead dog, the British establishment itself, which for years had unflinchingly protected one of its own—a corrupt political leader who in the end actually used party funds to pay off the ineffectual gunman—also underwent some scrutiny. (But alas, never quite enough.) And because of Rinka’s death, much of this story has been examined and reexamined in the decades since. But nothing comes close to this excellent, elegantly written account.

As it happens, I know quite a bit about Jeremy Thorpe, his frantic homicidal plots, and the fragility of the British system of justice, because, in May 1979, I was packed off by the late Murray Gart, then editor in chief of the Washington Star, to cover Thorpe’s trial. On a day-to-day, practically hour-to-hour, basis. When I protested—who in the United States wants to hear the minutiae of some British politician’s crime?—Gart silenced me with a few sentences: “In the first place, this isn’t just the story of a murderer who happens to be a famous politician. This is the story of the intricate ways the British themselves view homosexuality. Read about the trials of Oscar Wilde,” he said. “And in the second: a dog was killed instead of a person. In Britain that’s a much, much bigger tragedy.”

Gart was right on both counts. When I arrived at the Old Bailey on Day One, the place was stuffed with rows of happy journalists as well as nervous lawyers—one of whom informed me he was secretly representing former prime minister Harold Wilson—and my petition for a precious seat was rejected immediately and out of hand until I bribed some court official with two armloads of fresh tulips. (I have no idea, to this day, why that worked.) Everyone in the dock or on the stand—the inept gunman, nervous Norman Scott, and especially Thorpe in his tweed suits, who never testified—looked seedy and off-putting. The dog was certainly the only character in the whole saga worthy of sympathy; Norman Scott, although another intended victim, somewhat less so.

In fact, as John Preston makes clear, you could not in a million years find a less auspicious person to consort with than Norman Scott, a handsome young man when Thorpe first met him, who felt periodically victimized and needed an outlet for an unabating sense of injury. The Liberal party leader found this out the hard way: “For the last five years as you probably know, Jeremy and I have had a ‘homosexual’ relationship,” Scott wrote Ursula Thorpe, the leader’s mother, in 1965. “[T]hrough my meeting with Jeremy.  .  . I gave birth to this vice that lies latent in every man.” Well, no—old Ursula really didn’t know, not about anything. And as for “this vice,” the practice thereof was actually illegal in the Britain of 1965. So you can imagine Thorpe’s reaction when his mother called and he realized that his former lover was of an epistolary bent.

Three years later—by which time Thorpe, with an eye to his political future, had married Caroline Allpass, a nice young lady who didn’t ask questions—an aggrieved Scott (also newly married, his wife expecting) telephoned the Thorpe residence. It was Caroline Allpass Thorpe who answered, and she was greeted by Norman Scott with the news that (a) the Liberal leader most likely had Scott’s National Insurance card in his possession, and (b) Scott was certain Thorpe had his card because “he was my employer. We were lovers. You have a baby and you know what it must be like for my wife with no money.”

About a year later, Caroline died in a crash, her car having veered from one lane into another where it hit a truck head-on. When I interviewed Norman Scott, he said he’d always felt guilty about that terrible phone call, wondering if, somehow, Caroline was dwelling on his revelations about her husband’s secret past when the accident occurred. Whatever the truth of the matter, Thorpe became convinced that his ex-lover’s volatile nature was, indeed, the cause of his wife’s death, and—neither for the first nor the last time—he talked to his good friend Peter Bessell about what he periodically called “the ultimate solution.” Translated, Thorpe explained, this meant that Scott should be lured to the United States, somehow or other, and there either be shot, poisoned, or beaten to death with a shovel. After which, Thorpe concluded, Scott’s body should be dumped in a Florida swamp.

But here’s the even more interesting part: For six years thereafter, right up to the jammed-gun moment, the Liberal leader was relentless in his insistence that Scott should share Rinka’s sad fate. Bessell, or another of Thorpe’s close friends, could hardly step into his parliamentary offices without being assailed by some elaborate homicidal plot—one Thorpe also liked to call “the Scottish Matter”—which he wanted carried out by surrogates hired by these same friends. “Peter, it’s no worse than shooting a sick dog,” was how Thorpe characterized his plan to Bessell in an amazingly clairvoyant moment.

Of course, you can see how frustrating it must have been for a wannabe prime minister, a man whose party garnered six million votes (nearly 20 percent of the total) in 1974, to learn that a former flame possesses copies of old letters, some of which the ex had either handed over to the police on occasion or, alternatively, shared with friends and, in one instance, a physician. Especially since one of these letters—presumably referencing Scott’s desire to work abroad—ended with this memorable last line: “Bunnies can (and will) go to France. .  .  . I miss you.”

So it was inevitable that certain top-ranking members of Edward Heath’s government passed details of the affair on to MI5 where, as the author cleverly discovers, “they joined an already bulging file on Jeremy Thorpe.” It was probably predictable, as well, that Heath’s rival, Labor’s Harold Wilson, considered leaking details of the Thorpe file to the press (but did not). And you can see why Britain’s leaders didn’t go all out in their efforts to destroy Thorpe’s ambitions: Any party leader whose first campaign slogan was “Faith, Hope and Jeremy” and whose second (1974) was “One More Heave!” probably didn’t need a downhill push. That was the year that Thorpe lost more than 4,000 votes in his North Devon constituency—and within two years, he was ousted as party leader. Two years after that, just around the time of his trial, Thorpe lost his seat in the House of Commons.

I wish I had known about MI5’s bulging file on Thorpe at the time of his trial because the entirety of that 45-day spectacle—known at the time, perhaps inevitably, as “The Trial of the Century”—seemed to take place in an inviolate vacuum. The judge in the case, Sir Joseph Cantley, his face always bright crimson after lunch breaks, was, even by Old Bailey stand­ards, startlingly dim. His summing-up to the jury was a scandal: Scott was (in his view) “a crook .  .  . a fraud .  .  . a sponger .  .  . a whiner”; the case against Thorpe was “almost entirely circumstantial,” when, in fact, it was not circumstantial at all; the alleged gunman was “a buffoon”; and Scott’s claim that the two were lovers “was the kind of story people are so ready to believe these days even if it wasn’t true.”

Small wonder, then, that the jury bit and Jeremy Thorpe was acquitted. For that matter, everyone on trial was acquitted, the gunman included. Norman Scott, who during testimony had told the judge “I didn’t think this court would ever sit, I can assure you. I thought the establishment would cover it up,” was basically half-correct in his earlier supposition. The court sat, but the cover-up continued and lasted until mid-June 1979. But the thing of it was this: Practically everyone who counted in Britain—meaning the establishment that protected Thorpe for so long—knew for a fact that, despite the verdict, Thorpe was guilty. After the trial Thorpe was free—he wasn’t incarcerated—but no one wanted to have much to do with him, and he died, still in disgrace, in 2014.

Whenever Mr. Justice Cantley took his long lunch breaks I made it my business to spend time with the elegant writer Sybille Bedford, who was also covering the trial, and with the Private Eye columnist Auberon Waugh (son of Evelyn), who was doing the same but in an entirely different manner. It was Waugh who informed me that his own brief plunge into politics—he was determined to represent something he called the Dog Lovers’ party in Thorpe’s own constituency of North Devon—had been unfairly thwarted, in classic British style. The thwarter in question? The barrister George Carman, Thorpe’s very effective trial attorney. Carman had gotten an injunction preventing Waugh from publishing his campaign manifesto for prospective voters because, Carman said, it might prejudice the Thorpe trial. Try it, he told Waugh, and Waugh would be sued for libel—”and of course,” as Waugh explained to me in a thoughtful tone, “over here a libel lawsuit is the average Englishman’s way of earning a second income.”

“Well,” I said to Waugh, with a nudge, “you can tell me. What, exactly, was your censored campaign slogan? What did it say?”

“Rinka is not forgotten. Rinka lives. Woof woof. Vote Waugh. ”

“Not really a terrific slogan,” I told him.

“Better than ‘One More Heave,’ ” Waugh replied.

Judy Bachrach, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, is the author, most recently, of Glimpsing Heaven: The Stories and Science of Life After Death.