A rum trade, British journalism. Those who do well out of it
can’t wait to forget their “get your foot in the door, laddie” training and
start acting as though their families have been farming a thousand acres in Purbeck
since the Norman conquest, writing occasional anguished letters to the papers
they once edited about whether Purdey can survive being owned by a Swiss fancy
goods company. And so on.
Charles Moore, ex-editor of everything, isn’t one of these,
of course, but he does give the impression of penning his Spectator columns after an exquisite afternoon in the grounds with
his family, being painted by Gainsborough.
He can also say some sensible things. As a dedicated non-watcher
of the BBC, I haven’t seen the Thorpe programme but he has and last week he
wrote, after noting that horrible things can be highly comic, “For some reason,
I share the general hunch that Thorpe probably did ask for Scott to be
murdered, but it has never been proved. In a case in which almost everyone
involved had trouble with the truth, the jury were surely right to acquit.”
It’s a little reminder that, even if there’s a “general
hunch” about someone, actually translating that into a solid prosecutable case
is quite another matter, just as it’s a reminder to certain others that Thorpe was
probably “acting on the advice of his lawyer” when he sat stony-faced and
utterly silent throughout the trial, rather than risking cross-examination – as
though a lawyer’s advice ever has anything to do with innocence or the truth.
I knew his wife Marion’s family a little but not him. Thorpe had been very
popular in the early days, an exceptionally funny mimic whose impressions of
fellow politicians regularly had party-goers – he was in demand socially – in
fits of helpless laughter, perhaps creating his media reputation for being “modern”
and “unstuffy”. Well yes, ordering
someone to be shot dead may not be very modern but it was certainly unstuffy,
wasn’t it?
His secret lay partly in being a Liberal MP. The Liberal, or Liberal–Democrat party has attracted rogues, thieves and
hustlers for a century, like moths to a flame. The thoroughly sinister Thorpe
and the unspeakable Cyril Smith, who required a chair for each unloved buttock,
found their natural home among members who will believe absolutely anything as
long as it’s “liberal”.
Thorpe had, in fact, been preceded by the most sinister
figure of them all a half a century before, when Maundy Gregory, son of a
clergyman, had begun illegally selling peerages for the Liberal party on a
scale that makes Nixon look like a petty shoplifter, netting himself millions in commission. Among the usual
Liberal scandals, bankruptcies and trials one performance even outshone Thorpe’s
when, after the sudden death of the partner who’d changed her will in his
favour, he was oddly reluctant to have her buried.
A botched killing, a hired assassin who looked and talked like
Peter Sellers, a dead dog and a weeping Norman Scott in the barren vastness of
Dartmoor had nothing on Gregory’s tableau
vivant: he schlepped around the beautiful old churches of the Thames valley
with a map on his lap and the corpse of Edith Rosse jammed upright into the front passenger seat of his car. There he would leave her - there is no record of her complaining - while
he was inside the vicarage making inquiries as to graveyard vacancies before
returning, unruffled, to his jalopy and bowling on to the next church.
This sublime performance ended when he finally located a
suitable riverside church where Edith, none
the worse for all the travel, was eventually interred in a coffin with a loose lid. Nice
Mr Gregory, it seems, had been looking for a burial place subject to floods,
one that would eventually dilute the traces of the poison he had used on her.
Ah, these Liberals! All heart.
Thorpe’s trial was a thoroughly squalid affair with Thorpe
trying unsuccessfully to put space between himself and the dirty little gang of
villains and fixers who sat alongside him in the dock. Bessel, the chief witness,
was yet another hair-raisingly corrupted Liberal MP from central casting, a Methodist
preacher turned financial hustler and fraudster, gravel voiced, quite without
shame and, already cadaverous from the lung disease that killed him, reeking of
the death and cynicism that surrounded the whole affair. If the prosecution had
been looking for a witness to ruin their case then they couldn’t have made a
better choice.
No doubt many believe that’s what they did. It’s still worth
remembering, though, that it was a jury that acquitted him and, reluctantly, I
agree with Moore that the jury was probably right not to convict. Two things worked particularly in Thorpe’s
favour: the fact that nobody had actually been killed, or even hurt, which to
an extent took the sting out of the issue, and the extraordinary and
disturbing weirdness of the accusations and personnel.
And their near unbelievability. Looking through the narrow McCann
prism, one remembers that Amaral’s logical inference that if the body was gone
then the parents calculatedly transported it, was met not just with
disagreement but public expressions of outraged, arm waving, disgust and horror
that he could even think such a
thing, the maniac, about Kate McCann.
And I think that Thorpe benefitted from the same reaction. It’s not just corruption
that protects public figures but the crazed belief of that public that they have
somehow got close to them through their celebrity, close enough to believe that
they could never “do such a thing”.
So no, juicy visions of Thorpe being forcibly gang-sodomized,
preferably in the Dartmoor prison near where the shooting took place, went
unfulfilled. The rest of his life, though, was equally horrible, more grotesque
and much more long-lasting – disgraced whatever the verdict, paralysed first by
the realization that rehabilitation would never be possible and then by disease, he lingered on for decades, mostly in a darkened room amid the stucco
and elegance of his wife's beautiful house in Orme Square, a reminder of what can happen if you are
acquitted but cannot “demonstrate your innocence”.
He still revolts me, viscerally, to this day. 
One of their own
