An Ordeal by Scandal

An Ordeal by Scandal Jeremy Thorpe, facing possible life sentence, goes on trial

"How say you, Thorpe, are you guilty or not guilty?" The clerk's loud, unemotional voice carried across the small, airless courtroom to the oak and glass-paneled dock. The tallest of the four defendants, a somber figure in a dark gray suit, stood uncertainly. When it came, the response was low and fatigued: "Not guilty." With that, former Liberal Party Leader Jeremy Thorpe, 50, once a rising star of British politics, last week went on trial in London's Old Bailey criminal court for conspiracy and incitement to murder.

What London's tabloid daily Sun unblushingly headlined as Britain's "trial of the century" had been postponed to allow Thorpe to run for re-election to the parliamentary seat he had held for 20 years. His North Devon constituency, however, turned him out with a humiliating 8,500-vote majority for a relatively unknown Tory candidate. Nationally, the Liberals slid from 14 to eleven seats. Analysts doubted that the Liberals' 1-million-vote loss was a direct result of the scandal. But Thorpe unhappily conceded that it was responsible at least for his own defeat: "It certainly hasn't been an assistance--that should be obvious to anybody!"

Thorpe and three erstwhile associates --former Liberal Party Deputy Treasurer David Holmes, 48, Businessmen John Le Mesurier, 47, and George Deakin, 39 --face possible life sentences on charges of plotting the murder of a former male model, Norman Scott, 39, in order to prevent him from publicly claiming that he had had a three-year homosexual liaison with Thorpe in the 1960s. Introduced into testimony last week, for example, were two letters Thorpe had written to Scott on House of Commons stationery; he called Scott by such endearments as "Bunnies," and signed "Yours affectionately, Jeremy --P.S. I miss you." The prosecution told the jury of nine men and three women that as Thorpe "climbed the political ladder, his anxiety [about Scott] became an obsession and his thoughts desperate." At Thorpe's instigation a former airline pilot, Andrew Newton, 31, was offered $20,000 to carry out the killing. Thorpe, it was alleged in pretrial testimony, characterized the plan as not much worse than doing away with "a sick dog." In October 1975, Newton has admitted, he lured Scott to a lonely Devon moor and leveled a gun at him. But Newton apparently panicked and instead shot Scott's dog, a Great Dane named Rinka, then fled.

The trial judge, Sir Joseph Cantley, 68, rejected initial defense attempts to disqualify three prosecution witnesses who have signed contracts to sell their steamy stories to newsmen. He also warned the 69 attendant reporters: "No one must tamper with the witnesses. No interviews, nothing. Anybody who does will be punished. Better bring a toothbrush if you plan to do that."

Throughout the first week of the trial, which is expected to last up to three months, Thorpe sat morosely in his straight-back chair, glancing only occasionally at his wife Marion and his mother, a few feet away. Many of the spectators at "case 782002" who knew the jaunty Jeremy of the recent past were reminded of nothing so much as a sapped, wizening portrait of Dorian Gray. Not without sympathy, one wigged barrister peered out the window at a throng of TV cameramen and photographers, who were dogging Thorpe's every entrance and exit. "Well, we're a sensationalist nation," he said, "but think of a poor blighter having to take 13 weeks of that."

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