Jeremy Thorpe

John Jeremy Thorpe (29 April 1929 – 4 December 2014) was a British politician who was Member of Parliament (MP) for North Devon from 1959 to 1979 and Leader of the Liberal Party from 1967 to 1976. In May 1979 he was tried at the Old Bailey on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder his former boyfriend, Norman Scott. Thorpe was acquitted on all charges, but the case, and the scandal surrounding it, ended his political career.

Thorpe was the son and grandson of Conservative MPs, but decided to align with the small and ailing Liberal Party. After studying Law at the University of Oxford, he became one of the Liberals' brightest stars in the 1950s. He entered Parliament at the age of 30, rapidly made his mark, and was elected party leader in 1967. After an uncertain start during which the party lost ground, Thorpe capitalised on the growing unpopularity of the Conservative and Labour parties to lead the Liberals through a period of electoral success. This culminated in the general election of February 1974, when the Liberals won 6 million votes out of some 31 million cast. Under the first-past-the-post electoral system, this gave them only 14 seats, but in a hung parliament, no party having an overall majority, Thorpe was in a strong position. He was offered a cabinet post by the Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath, if he would bring the Liberals into a coalition government. His price for such a deal, reform of the electoral system, was rejected by Heath, who resigned in favour of a minority Labour government.

The February 1974 election was the high-water mark of Thorpe's career. Thereafter his and his party's fortunes declined, particularly from late 1975 when rumours of his involvement in a plot to murder Norman Scott began to multiply. Thorpe resigned the leadership in May 1976 when his position became untenable. When the matter came to court three years later, Thorpe chose not to give evidence to avoid being cross-examined by counsel for the prosecution. This left many questions unanswered; despite his acquittal, Thorpe was discredited and did not return to public life. From the mid-1980s he was disabled by Parkinson's disease. During his long retirement he gradually recovered the affections of his party, and by the time of his death was honoured by a later generation of leaders, who drew attention to his record as an internationalist, a supporter of human rights and an opponent of apartheid and all forms of racism.

Family background and early childhood

John Jeremy Thorpe was born in South Kensington, London, on 29 April 1929. His father was John Henry Thorpe, a lawyer and politician who was Member of Parliament for Manchester Rusholme from 1919 and 1923. His mother, Ursula Norton-Griffiths, was the daughter of another Conservative MP, Sir John Norton-Griffiths, widely known as "Empire Jack" because of his passionate imperialism. The Thorpe family claimed kinship with distant forebears carrying the name, including Sir Robert Thorpe, who was briefly Lord Chancellor in 1372, and Thomas Thorpe, who was Speaker of the House of Commons in 1453–1454. There is no direct evidence of any link between these figures and Jeremy Thorpe's family.

The more recent Thorpe ancestors were Irish, stemming from the elder of two brothers who were, according to family tradition, soldiers under Cromwell during the re-conquest of Ireland. Both were rewarded with land; the descendants of the younger brother—from County Carlow—prospered in Dublin as High Sheriffs and Lord Mayors, but those of the elder lost their land and became tenant farmers and tradesmen. Jeremy Thorpe's great-grandfather, William Thorpe, was a Dublin policeman who, having been a labourer, joined the police as a constable and rose to the rank of superintendent. One of his many sons, John Thorpe, became an Anglican priest and served as Archdeacon of Macclesfield from 1922 to 1932. The archdeacon's marriage in 1884 to a daughter of the prosperous Anglo-Irish Aylmer family brought considerable wealth to the Thorpes, as did his elder daughter Olive's marriage into the influential Christie-Miller family of Cheshire. Both John Henry and Jeremy Thorpe would benefit from this connection, as the Christie-Millers paid the costs of their education.

Thorpe was his parents' third child, following two sisters. His upbringing was privileged and protected, under the care of nannies and nursemaids until, in 1935, he began attending Wagner's day school in Queen's Gate. He became a proficient violinist, and often performed at school concerts. Although John Henry Thorpe was no longer in parliament, he had maintained many of his political contacts and friendships, and leading politicians were regularly entertained at the Thorpe home. Among the strongest of these friendships was that with the Lloyd George family—Ursula Thorpe was a close friend of the former Liberal prime minister's daughter, Megan, who became Jeremy's godmother. The former prime minister David Lloyd George, an occasional visitor, became Jeremy's political hero and role model, and helped to form his ambitions for a political career in the Liberal Party.

Education

Schooling

In January 1938 Thorpe went to Cothill House, a school in Oxfordshire that prepared boys for entry to Eton College. By mid-1939 war looked likely, and the Thorpe family moved from London to the Surrey village of Limpsfield, where Thorpe attended Hazelwood School. War began in September 1939; in June 1940, with invasion threatening, the Thorpe children were sent to live with their American aunt, Kay Norton-Griffiths, in Boston. In September that year Thorpe began at the Rectory School in Pomfret, Connecticut. He remained there for three generally happy years; his main extracurricular task, he later recalled, was looking after the school's pigs. In 1943 it was thought safe for the children to return to England, and John Henry used his political connections to secure for Jeremy a passage in the Royal Navy cruiser HMS Phoebe.

Thorpe started at Eton in September 1943. He proved an indifferent scholar, he lacked sporting aptitude, and although superficially a rebel against conformity, his frequent toadying to authority earned him the nickname "Oily Thorpe". He also annoyed his fellow-pupils by parading his acquaintance with a range of famous and important people. He offended the school's traditionalists by resigning from the school's cadet force, and shocked others by expressing his intention to marry Princess Margaret, then second in line to the British throne. Thorpe revealed little about his Eton years, beyond his membership of the school orchestra and his winning a cup for his violin playing—he briefly considered the possibility of a career as a professional violinist. His time at Eton was marred by the death of his father in 1944, at the age of 57.

Oxford

Having secured a place at Trinity College, Oxford, Thorpe left Eton in March 1947. In September he began 18 months' National Service, but within six weeks was discharged on medical grounds after collapsing while attempting an assault course. As his place at Oxford was unavailable until the following year, Thorpe worked as a temporary preparatory school teacher before his admission to Trinity on 8 October 1948.

Thorpe was reading Law, but his primary interests at Oxford were political and social. From his earliest undergraduate days he drew attention to himself by his flamboyant behaviour; according to Thorpe's biographer, Michael Bloch, his "pallid appearance, dark hair and eyes and angular features, gave him a diabolonian air". He was quick to seek political office, initially in the Oxford University Liberal Club (OULC) which, despite the doldrums affecting the Liberal Party nationally, was a thriving club with over 800 members. Thorpe was elected to the club's committee at the end of his first term; in November 1949 he became its president. Outside Oxford, Thorpe showed a genuine commitment to Liberalism in his enthusiastic contributions to the party's national election campaigns, and on reaching his 21st birthday in April 1950, applied to have his name added to the party's list of possible parliamentary candidates.

Beyond the OULC, Thorpe achieved the presidency of the Oxford University Law Society, although his principal objective was the presidency of the Oxford Union, an office frequently used as a stepping-stone to national prominence. Normally, would-be presidents first served in the Union's junior offices, as secretary, treasurer or librarian, but Thorpe, having impressed as a confident and forceful debater, decided early in 1950 to try directly for the presidency. He was easily defeated by the future broadcaster Robin Day. His single-minded pursuit of office, and the dubious strategies he sometimes employed, led to some acrimonious campaigns, but he gained many supporters, and later in 1950 beat two formidable contenders—the socialist Dick Taverne and the Conservative William Rees-Mogg—to secure the presidency for the Hilary term of 1951.

Thorpe's term as president was marked by the range of distinguished guest speakers that he recruited, among them the future Lord Chancellor Lord Hailsham, the barrister and former Liberal MP Norman Birkett, and the humorist Stephen Potter. The time-consuming nature of his various offices meant that Thorpe required a fourth year to complete his law studies, which ended in the summer of 1952 with a third-class honours degree.