Thorpe: Casualty of a Cover-Up

It was yet a fresh warning that for a politician, a coverup, or even the appearance of one, can prove more fatal than the original problem. Buried, bad news festers; promptly addressed, it may perhaps be cauterized and survived.

The example this time was Jeremy Thorpe, 47, for nine years leader of Britain's gadfly Liberal Party and at one time one of the most enterprising figures on the British political scene, a bowler-hatted Etonian who would slog through department stores and cow pastures to greet voters and was a Fleet Street favorite. Yet for more than four months, Thorpe had been politically besieged because of allegations that he had been involved in a homosexual relationship in the early 1960s--a charge that, it gradually became clear, either Thorpe or some of his well-meaning but inept friends had been trying to suppress with cash payments since 1968 and, ultimately, with lies. Last week, as key members of his own party began deserting him, Thorpe quit as party chief, maintaining his innocence and blaming the whole affair on a "sustained witch hunt" against him.

Wild Allegation. Thorpe's alleged homosexual affair first splashed across the headlines in January, when an unemployed model on trial for a social security fraud, Norman Scott, 35, blurted out in court that he was "being hounded because of my sexual relationship to Jeremy Thorpe." The Liberal leader immediately asserted that "there is no truth to Mr. Scott's wild allegation" but admitted that he had known Scott more than a decade ago. Thorpe said he met Scott, then 19, when he was training horses for a landowner acquaintance of Thorpe's. A year later, Thorpe and his family befriended the boy after he suffered a nervous breakdown. Yet Scott stuck by his story, later insisting that he thought he was "going to live with Thorpe and be cared for by him."

Stories about a Thorpe-Scott relationship had quietly circulated before, and in 1971, with Scotland Yard's help, they were privately investigated by Liberal Party elders. Scott was questioned about his accusations and collapsed under crossexamination. The Liberal leaders then accepted Thorpe's denial. When Scott trumpeted his story this year, former Liberal Chief Whip Cyril Smith immediately pronounced it "ludicrous." But next day Thorpe's credibility suffered a major jolt when his longtime friend Peter Bessell, a former Liberal M.P. who moved to the U.S. in 1974 following a financial scrape in Britain, admitted that he had paid Scott a "retainer" of $15 to $30 every week or so from 1968 to 1970. Bessell insisted that he, not Thorpe, was the target of extortion by Scott, explaining that Scott had learned of a liaison Bessell once had with a secretary. Nonetheless, Thorpe repeated a promise to his shaken comrades to step down if the Scott matter became a serious embarrassment, and the Liberals--perhaps eying two important by-elections in March--voted their "continued support."

The affair quieted down for a month. Then, in early March, David Holmes, another Thorpe chum and former Liberal official, volunteered that he had paid Scott $7,000 just before Britain's Feb. 1974 general elections "without the knowledge" of Thorpe. Party Whip Smith, never a close ally of Thorpe's, pointedly told a TV interviewer that he was "frightened by what may yet come out." But Thorpe stood by his insistence that Scott's allegations were "pure moonshine."

Another brief calm ensued until two weeks ago, when Bessell, hounded by British reporters at his home in California, undermined most of the Thorpe defense. He admitted that his blackmail tale had been a "coverup ... to prevent Scott from standing up in court and making statements about Jeremy. The whole idea was to make Scott shut his mouth."

Thorpe's parliamentary colleagues were aghast. When one Liberal M.P. publicly asked why Thorpe did not sue for libel if the charges were groundless, the party chief's puzzling explanation was that since Scott had no money he had no hope of collecting damages. In a last attempt to prove the innocence of his relationship with Scott, Thorpe released letters he had written to him in 1961 and 1962. They failed to allay all doubts. One letter, for instance, was signed tenderly: "Yours affectionately, Jeremy. I miss you." The following day, Thorpe wrote another letter, resigning his post as party leader.

Credibility Challenged. In the end, Thorpe had to go because, said the Guardian in a sympathetic editorial, his own colleagues had, "privately or publicly, challenged his credibility." Thorpe might possibly have saved himself had he immediately come clean on the whole business. Even if he had had no sexual relationship with Scott and knew nothing of the cash payments to the model, he erred in not investigating and exposing his friends' inept attempts to protect him. His failure to do so gave the damaging impression that Thorpe was engaged in a cover-up--as he may have been.

Scott, to be sure, was not Thorpe's only political problem. His electoral fortunes peaked in the Feb. 1974 election, when he lured enough discontented voters from both Labor and the Tories to poll an impressive 20% of the vote and won, with just 14 seats in the Commons, what looked like an ideal position on the pivot of power. But Thorpe decided against bringing the Liberals into government for the first time in 44 years and turned down a Tory bid to join them in a coalition.

Since then, the Liberals have lost much of their brief mid-1970s' flash and glitter, and another revival is not likely any time soon. Thorpe's interim replacement as party leader is Jo Grimond, 62, a veteran Liberal warhorse who headed the party from 1956 to 1967. His stewardship will be brief: plagued by increasing deafness, he is willing to serve only until midsummer, when a new Liberal leader will be selected in a process that may be bitter and divisive and could further postpone the new dawn that dapper Jeremy Thorpe once promised to bring the Liberals.

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