Warts and All

The Thorpe Case (cont'd)

HOW JEREMY SEDUCED ME, read a tittering headline in London's tabloid Daily Mail, as Britain's most lurid crime story in years entered a particularly purple phase. For a second week, a three-judge panel in Minehead, a remote town on the Somerset coast, was conducting a magistrate's hearing into charges that Jeremy Thorpe, 49, the dapper, old Etonian Liberal M.P. who had once been one of Britain's fastest rising political stars, had conspired to murder Norman Scott. A sometime male model, Scott had publicly proclaimed that he had once had a homosexual affair with Thorpe. This time, it was Scott's turn to talk.

Scott said two years ago that he had had a liaison with Thorpe in the early 1960s, and it was this revelation that forced Thorpe to resign as head of the small but then increasingly influential Liberal Party. Thorpe's problems worsened last year, when a former pilot named Andrew Newton, who had served time in prison for shooting Scott's dog in 1975, charged that he had been hired by Thorpe and three others to kill Scott. Early in the Minehead hearings, the Crown produced witnesses who testified that Scott had threatened to tell all about his relations with Thorpe as long ago as 1965, and that Thorpe became obsessed with the political damage he might suffer if Scott were not silenced.

Sporting a light gray suit and a modishly slicked-down hair style, Scott told the court how he had left school at 15 and lived a drifter's life as a stable boy and riding instructor until one day in 1960, when he met Thorpe at a stable where he was working in Oxfordshire. As Scott related it, Thorpe somewhat inexplicably told him to come to him in London if he ever needed anything. A year later Scott, then 21 and reeling from a nervous breakdown, visited Thorpe at his office at Westminster. Thorpe, then 32 and a rising young bachelor M.P. from North Devon, drove Scott to his mother's house in Surrey saying that there they could "talk about things more easily." That night, said Scott, Thorpe sent him off to bed with a copy of Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin's 1956 novel about homosexual love. Said Scott: "He had said I would like it. It is, in fact, a very beautiful story." An hour later, as Scott told it, Thorpe came to his room in a dressing gown and sat down and talked to him about his troubles. Then, Scott said, Thorpe kissed him and "got into bed with me" and began making love. Scott claimed that he did not protest because he thought Thorpe's mother was in the next room and might hear. Scott said that when Thorpe returned again the next morning, following a second nocturnal visit, "I thought that he was going to do it again." Instead, Scott recalled, Thorpe "asked me how I wanted my eggs done."

Over the next two years, Scott said, he had many trysts with Thorpe, at such varied locations as his Westminster office, a bathroom in a hotel in Thorpe's Devon constituency, and a London flat that Thorpe had rented for him. Before Scott broke off the relationship in 1963 ("I hated the wretched sexual thing"), Thorpe was calling him "Bunny," buying him clothes and even taking him to his elite London club, the Reform.

Under fierce crossexamination, however, Scott admitted that he had told "dreadful lies" to police in earlier statements because he was frightened. But he insisted he was telling the truth, and as proof cited "something I could only know if I'd slept with him." Thorpe, he said, "has warts, sort of nodules" under one or both of his arms.

Newton, who testified last week, said he had taken Scott out to a Devon moor one night in October 1975 and shot Scott's Great Dane, Rinka. Newton said he then aimed at Scott, but pretended it had jammed in order not to have to shoot him. Scott, for his part, maintained that the murder attempt was not faked.

Thorpe sat silently through the proceedings peering over his half-moon spectacles. He and his attorneys will have their day in court if and when the Minehead; magistrates decide that the case should; go to trial.

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