Two funny, yet disturbing, books have me thinking
about who really governs Britain – and who should
Everyone knows about it now, of course. The 2018 BBC drama
series A Very English Scandal has introduced a new generation to one of
the strangest stories of the 1970s – the Party leader, Jeremy Thorpe, who was charged
with incitement and conspiracy to murder. Until recently, the matter had been
largely forgotten. It had faded to a footnote. One had to be 60 to remember it
at all well, and no-one who wasn’t knew, or cared, what it had been about. Then
in 2014 Thorpe, by then an old and very sick man, died; two years later, John
Preston published the book on which the series was based.
At about the same time, political journalist Ben Wright
published Order, Order! The Rise and Fall of Political Drinking. One
book is a story of shot dogs, petty crooks, skullduggery and attempted murder. The other
is a merry romp through the many bars of the Palace of Westminster. Both are
entertaining, but they do leave you wondering who the hell has been in charge
of the nation. They also left me thinking hard about who we want in public
life, and what we want of them. My conclusions weren’t quite what one might
expect.
*
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| Thorpe in 1965 (National Portrait Gallery/Walter Bird) |
For those unacquainted with the Jeremy Thorpe scandal, the
bare facts are as follows. In 1961 Thorpe was a young Liberal MP who had first
been elected to Parliament two years earlier (as had Margaret Thatcher).
Visiting a friend in the countryside, he was rather taken with a handsome,
smouldering 21-year-old stable lad called Norman Scott. He resolved to seduce
him, did so, and conducted an affair with him for several years. This was
risky, as homosexual sex was to be illegal in Britain until 1967. The affair
palled for Thorpe. However, Scott proved unable to manage his life well
afterwards and turned to Thorpe for help.
Scott does not appear to have been vindictive or spiteful; he
had had a difficult start in life, but loved animals and only really wanted to
work with horses. However, Thorpe, fearing blackmail, dumped the problem on
another Liberal MP, Peter Bessell – a man scarcely better able to manage his
own affairs than Scott was. For several years, Bessell made various efforts to
keep the lid on Scott, by helping him in small ways here and there. However, as
Scott’s life spiralled out of control, he became more and more importunate. In
the meantime, in 1967 Thorpe was elected leader of the Liberal Party, making
him a major national figure. Thorpe resolved to do away with Scott rather than
risk a scandal.
The matter climaxed with a botched murder attempt, Thorpe’s
fall, and his eventual trial and acquittal for incitement and conspiracy to
murder. It was a scandal that had the nation rivetted for years, and I have
never forgotten it, for I was a Liberal activist in the 1970s; I was thus
involved, albeit very peripherally, and was present at one or two of the
occasions described in the book.
Author John Preston, formerly of the Sunday Telegraph
and London’s Evening Standard, has done a splendid job. A complex
narrative with multiple actors is very well managed, and the book is extremely well-paced.
It also conveys the feel of the times. For example, Preston takes us through the reforms of
1967 that finally made homosexuality legal in Britain, legislation that owed
much to Lord Arran, a well-loved if somewhat eccentric peer known to his
friends as Boofy; he and his wife were also deeply committed to the cause of
badger welfare, and kept a number of the animals in their house, wearing
Wellington boots indoors to avoid badger bites. Arran was deluged with hate
mail for advocating the homosexual cause. “On another occasion,” writes
Preston, “a parcel containing human excrement arrived at his office.
Apparently, under the impression that it was pâté, his secretary told him, ‘I
threw it away, Lord Arran. It wouldn’t keep.’”
After the reform had passed: “Afterwards Lord
Arran was asked why his homosexual law reforms had succeeded, while his efforts
to protect the rights of badgers had not. Arran paused, and then said
ruminatively, ‘There are not many badgers in the House of Lords.’”
Throughout the book stalks the
figure of Jeremy Thorpe himself – charming, warm, kindly and utterly ruthless
in his use of his friends, especially Peter Bessell. In the end, Bessell was
not fooled. A few others, such as the journalist Auberon Waugh, never really had
been. Yet most people seem to have been fixated by Thorpe’s charm. The facts of
Thorpe’s affair were known to the police as early as 1962, and to successive
home secretaries from 1965. At no point was he warned that he could be
prosecuted, or advised to withdraw from the public eye. When he finally did
face trial, the proceedings were so heavily loaded in his favour as to seem
rigged; the summing-up of the judge, Sir Joseph Cantley, was so skewed towards
the principal defendant that it became the subject of a famous parody by the
comedian Peter Cook. There had clearly been a cover-up by the Establishment to
look after one of its own. Thorpe was acquitted. But although the Establishment
had saved his skin, it did not – to his own surprise – welcome him back; he
slid into obscurity and died there 35 years later, in 2014. Only then did this
bizarre affair resurface in the public consciousness.
*
My first thoughts on reading
Preston’s book were that I should be angry; that, as an idealistic young
activist 40 years ago, I had been betrayed by a cynical social system that
protected the powerful, and punished the Norman Scotts of this world. Neither
was Thorpe the only character in this book who committed crimes, and got away
with it where a mere pleb would not. A minor role was played by Labour
politician George Thomas, who arranged for Bessell to plead Thorpe’s case to
the then Home Secretary, Sir Frank Soskice. Thomas, later Lord Tonypandy, eventually
became a much-loved Speaker of the House
of Commons – yet after his death in 1997 it was suggested that he himself had
been homosexual, had been blackmailed because of it, and, worse, had been
guilty of child abuse (it should be said that this was never tested in court).
At another point in the narrative, Thorpe does a publicity stunt with Jimmy,
later Sir Jimmy, Savile, later exposed (again, after his death) as a child
abuser of epic proportions. Last but not least, a larger-than-life figure in
the later stages of the book was the Liberal Chief Whip, Cyril Smith, a man of
massive girth (he was said to weigh nearly 30 stone, about 190 kg). He was
finally revealed (again, after his death) to be a serial sex offender against
children.
What is particularly depressing
about Preston’s narrative, entertaining as it is, is that all of this was known
to people in power at the time. Thorpe’s MI5 file had hit the desk of
successive Home Secretaries and Prime Ministers. Of the latter, Harold Wilson
was also apparently well aware that Bessell’s business affairs were well dodgy.
(It is a pity he did not look harder at one of Bessell’s contemporaries, Labour
MP Robert Maxwell, who as chairman of the House catering committee apparently
flogged off all its best vintages, and may have trousered the proceeds.) As for Cyril Smith, in 1980 I was having
lunch with a friend and fellow Liberal activist in Liverpool, and commented
that I had brought Smith to Warwick University for a speaking engagement the
previous year, and had liked him (as indeed I had). “But you know that he
interferes with little boys,” my friend told me. It was, he said, well known in
Rochdale. It seems it was; an attempt to unmask him had been suppressed the
previous year. But the allegations did not surface properly until after Smith’s
death in 2010, 30 years later.
As I came to the end of A Very
English Scandal, I felt angry and cynical. Yet at the very end of the book,
there was something that lifted my spirits – of which more below. And then I
read Ben Wright’s Order, Order!, and started to see some more shades of
grey.
*
Ben Wright is a BBC political
correspondent, currently based in Washington. Order! Order! is a journey
through the alcoholic haze of British politics. It is, for the most part, about
Westminster (though there are some side-trips to Washington and a vodka-fuelled
romp through the Kremlin).
Like A Very English Scandal, it is
entertaining. Thus the Speaker of the Commons in the 1960s comes into the
Chamber so pissed that he cannot clamber into the chair, whereupon the
Government Chief Whip tells him he is a disgrace. “I’ll have you out of that
chair within three months,” he calls, to be told, “How can you get me out of
the chair, Bob, when I can’t get myself into it?” On a March evening in 1979
the Government falls (I remember this well) and the press corps corps find themselves
compelled to cover events without alcohol as the catering staff are on strike.
(“Passers-by were confronted with that most frightening spectacle: a sober mob
of journalists.”) Nicholas Soames, Churchill’s grandson, denying that he has
been drunk in the House: “My lunches consist of bananas, still water, preserved
apricots and bats’ droppings.”
But of course this does not always
end well. Wright records a Tory MP for High Peak who was notorious for his claret habit and became a sort of Lord of Misrule. Yet it caught up with
him in the end, and the MP and journalist Matthew Parris would later remember
the member towards the end of his life, drinking water at lunch but ordering
melon with port for dessert and desperately trying to spoon the port from it.
In due course he died. Wright’s purpose is not simply to make us laugh; indeed,
his last chapter reviews the various unpleasant ways liver disease can kill us.
To be honest, that chapter, true though it is, feels a little dutiful. But
Wright clearly wants to ensure that his book is not taken as a paean of praise
to heavy drinking, and he is right to do so.
Yet Wright also wants to present
the way that booze has lubricated political discourse – and to show us what we
might have lost. He quotes journalist Peter Oborne to this effect. “Political
discourse in the last century was more humorous, kinder, more generous,” says
Oborne. “Less earnestness, less dogmatism, more humanity at a personal level. I
don’t think it’s entirely a gain that we’ve moved from a culture that was based
on drinking alcohol together to a culture based on drinking coffee together.”
Wright looks at why things have changed.
The hard-drinking culture of the past was sometimes the product of a bygone
breed of MPs from an industrial, union background (and, though he does not say
so, one suspects the Tory squirearchy supplied a boozy element too). Today’s MP
is, by contrast, anodyne and without identity. “The demise of heavy industry,”
says Wright, “has been matched by the rise of the professional politician.
Today it is common for MPs of all stripes to be incubated in think tanks or
serve political apprenticeships as ministerial special advisers before entering
the Commons.” As Oborne hints, they
drink coffee. Neither are they so likely to hit The Gay Hussar or other West
End and Westminster restaurants to brief journalists off the record (as Wright
recounts, for Labour MPs, Alastair Campbell stopped that).
There is no evidence whatever that
this has improved our political discourse. And it has pushed the politician
away from the people. For proof of this we need only look at the popularity of
Nigel Farage, who is careful to be seen with a pint in hand. This is
calculated, as Farage more or less admits to Wright: “The reason it works is
because in a politically correct age where all this stuff is frowned upon I
think people see it as two fingers up to the establishment and political
correctness,” he says, though he claims that isn’t why he is doing it. But I
suspect it is, at least in part. The new sobriety may also have increased the
partisan divide. At Westminster, there always was one; the Tory and Labour
members tended to use different bars, But there was no strict apartheid. And in
Congress, says White, a discreet drinking culture saw the members drop by each
other’s rooms for a bourbon sundowner. No more.
Should we beg our pols to go back
on the booze? It’s tempting to say yes. At the end of 2016 I published my own
polemic, Such Little Accident, in which I argued that political
discourse depended on people meeting face-to-face and that we no longer did so.
I did not insist that these encounters should involve alcohol. But I implied
that they often would, and stressed the pub as a place where people did not go
as often as they did.
However, one thoughtful reviewer,
herself someone who had taken part in public life, wasn’t so sure. “As a teetotaller
I cannot say I am swayed by any argument that pubs are an answer to bringing
back real political debate," she wrote in a review. "As an ex-member of the Labour party and ex-city
councillor in the late 1980s, being teetotal excluded me from many if not the
majority of the decision making by the battalion of overwhelmingly white male
Labour councillors.” It is a fair comment, and the drinking culture of the
House of Commons as it was until the 1980s will have excluded, or at least not
drawn in, many who were not natural participants, especially women (Mo Mowlem
is the only woman politician who Wright cites as having navigated that culture
successfully). It is also bound to exclude those whose social or religious
background does not include the traditional British boozing culture. This
cannot be a good thing.
But something has been lost, and I
am unsure as to what has been gained.
*
Where do these two books leave us?
On the face of it, they are about the failure of the Westminster system. A
ruthless Establishment protects its own, even when they are mixed up in murder –
though only to protect itself; they are spat out afterwards. Meanwhile a
culture of drunkenness prevails in the House, but is then replaced by a cold
technocracy that alienates the voters. It is all rather grim. But there are
those shades of grey.
A Very English Scandal presents Thorpe, and to some extent Bessell, and their
contemporaries in their very worst light. In a way this is fair; it’s an awful
story. Yet Preston admits, albeit briefly, that Thorpe had genuine political
principles, of a sort. Moreover, although the book is well-researched, Preston
relies heavily on certain sources. He has to; most of the prime movers are
dead, and he has made every effort to speak to those who aren’t, as the Acknowledgements section makes clear.
But he seems to recount in great detail what Peter Bessell did, thought and
felt, so he may have relied heavily on a memoir, Cover-up,that Bessell published privately a
few years before his death.
There is also a conspiratorial feel
about the book in places. Thorpe’s first wife, Caroline Allpass, died in a car
accident not long after the 1970 General Election, after only two years of
marriage; her car drifted across the centre line on the A303 and hit a lorry
coming the other way. Preston hints at rumours that she had found out about
Norman Scott and seemed distracted at the time of the accident. In fact, the
witness accounts suggest she simply lost concentration (on a stretch of road
that was then quite dangerous; I knew it well). In another passage, Preston
implies that Wilson’s first Home Secretary, Sir Frank Soskice, not only knew of
the Scott affair in 1965 but had read compromising correspondence between
Thorpe and Scott, and swept it under the carpet. In fact, Preston’s account
suggests that while this is entirely possible, it’s far from proven; Soskice
may have had the facts to hand but not bothered to read them. The Establishment
did close ranks around Thorpe. But how deliberately, and how explicitly,
isn’t clear.
I wondered, too, to what extent the
Thorpe affair was the result of laws and mores that were themselves quite wrong.
Thorpe was terrified that he would be exposed as a practising homosexual at a
time when it was illegal – but it should never have been. In fact many public
figures must have wondered what would happen were their private lives to have
been exposed. They had good reason to be afraid, as Lord Arran’s mailbag
showed.
I have no wish to excuse Thorpe.
Preston may have shown us the worst of him, but it’s clear that he was charming
but cynical and a user of the worst sort. Neither should Bessell have a free
pass. He was a much nicer man, and behaved
well at the end; but his judgement was awful, as regards Thorpe and much else
besides. Moreover successive Home Secretaries knew how badly compromised Thorpe
was by his private life and did nothing. Late in the book we have Cyril Smith
as Liberal Chief Whip, trying to keep a lid on the scandal when he himself had horrible
things to hide. There is even a Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police
who in 1971 tacitly endorsed a cover-up when he must surely have known what was
in Thorpe’s police file. After I finished the book, I mentioned the latter to a
friend who is a former detective (not from the Met). He was not at all
surprised. “As a police officer, you were always dealing with people more
powerful than yourself,” he told me. “You were often told to be careful.” The
picture that emerges from Preston’s book is one of a corrupt and closed
Establishment that makes fools of us all. As for Order, Order!, it shows
us a world of (mostly) men pissed as farts in the Mother of Parliaments, as
capable of transacting the business of the land as they were of raising the Titanic.
And yet in a sense Peter Oborne was
right; something has gone. We are now governed by technocrats, former “research
assistants” whose purpose has always been to enter Parliament and whose private
lives, one suspects, have been dull; in today’s 24-hour rolling news culture,
they must have nothing to hide, and must always be sharp, available and
well-briefed. The idea of going on TV completely soused, as Wilson’s Foreign
Secretary George Brown did more than once, would be foreign to them. Perhaps it
should be. But it is hard to see what moves them.
The ructions over Brexit, in
particular, have uncovered a remarkable lack of spirit in the House. Many if
not most members are known to think that it is a bad idea, but cannot bring
themselves to oppose it openly lest they incur the wrath of their constituents
or their party leadership. So they will do nothing to stop it. One yearns for a George Brown, or even
perhaps a Churchill, to get tanked up on the terrace or in the Smoking Room and
stride into the chamber, kneel briefly to the chair, take their place upon the
green benches, rise – a little unsteadily – to their feet and proclaim: “Mr
Speaker, we are sleepwalking to disaster.” But they won’t. With one or two
proud exceptions, the careerist, technocratic nature of the modern politician is
not to take such a risk.
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| Reporting the trial: The Mirror, 1979 |
Perhaps this timidity is also
because they are under far greater scrutiny than they once were. On paper, of
course, we have become more tolerant. A man or woman’s sexual preferences are
now, in theory, no-one’s business but their own, provided they do not involve
children or the vulnerable. But a quick tour through a few Facebook discussion
groups can sometimes show how little has really changed. Those who take their
own stand on matters of policy can also be a target; I wonder if Lord Arran
might find a modern Tory Remain rebel’s postbag all too familiar. Moreover
there is now a merciless 24-hour news cycle that needs far more material than
it once did. A sharp light would be shone on the private life of anyone remotely
interesting. The colourful individuals of the past – the Tom Dribergs, the Bob
Boothbys – may still be with us, but not in public life. We should not be
surprised if they now choose to do something else. To be sure, Thorpe was a
disgrace, and being a drunk is not a virtue. But maybe the pendulum has swung
back too far the other way.
*
There is a gentler note at the end
of A Very English Scandal. Preston reproduces a letter from Peter
Bessell to Norman Scott, written after the trial at which both had – at some
personal cost – given evidence against Thorpe, only to see him walk. The letter
is kind and generous, and makes it clear that Bessell thought they had still
done the right thing in giving evidence – but also that, remarkably, he forgave
Thorpe:
The important thing is that we
must all be willing to face the absolute truth, even if the consequences are
not entirely pleasant for any of us…
There is a wonderful side to
Jeremy’s character which I shall always admire and hold in affection. That does
not excuse his actions in respect of you ...but he needs understanding and
sympathy just as much as the rest of us…
Bessell died a few years later. He
had been a fool to trust Thorpe, who did not deserve his forgiveness. Moreover
his own business and personal life had been a mess. Yet there is something
attractive in that letter, and I should much rather dine with its author than I
would with most current public figures. Maybe there is a question for us here .
What, actually, do we want our politicians to be? Would we have them cold,
sober, ambitious and obedient, as they have mostly become? Or would we rather
they were fashioned of the same warped, unseasoned wood as the rest of us, the
better to carry our hopes and dreams?
Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies
was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops
(ISBN 978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)
Follow Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19), on Facebook or on Goodreads
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