Thorpe affair

The Thorpe affair of the 1970s was a British political and sex scandal that ended the career of Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal Party and Member of Parliament (MP) for North Devon. The scandal arose from allegations by Norman Josiffe (otherwise known as Norman Scott) that he and Thorpe had a homosexual relationship in the early 1960s, and that Thorpe had begun a badly planned conspiracy to murder Josiffe, who was threatening to expose their affair.

Thorpe, while admitting that the two had been friends, denied any such relationship. With the help of political colleagues and a compliant press, he was able to ensure that rumours of misconduct went unreported for more than a decade. Scott's allegations were a persistent threat, however, and by the mid-1970s he was regarded as a danger both to Thorpe and to the Liberal Party, which was then enjoying a resurgence of popularity and was close to a place in government. Attempts to buy or frighten Scott into silence were unsuccessful, and the problem deepened, until the fallout following the shooting of his dog during a possible murder attempt by a hired gunman in October 1975 brought the matter into the open. After further newspaper revelations, Thorpe was forced to resign the Liberal leadership in May 1976, and subsequent police investigations led to him being charged, along with three others, with conspiracy to murder Scott. Before the case came to trial, Thorpe lost his parliamentary seat at the 1979 general election.

At the trial in May 1979, the prosecution's case depended heavily on the evidence of Scott, Thorpe's former parliamentary colleague Peter Bessell, and the hired gunman, Andrew Newton. None of these witnesses impressed the court. Bessell's credibility was undermined by the revelations of his financial arrangements with The Sunday Telegraph. In his summing-up the judge was scathing about the prosecution's evidence, and all four defendants were acquitted. Nevertheless, Thorpe's public reputation was damaged irreparably by the case. He had chosen not to testify at the trial, which left several matters unexplained amid public disquiet.

Thorpe's retirement into private life was followed by the onset of Parkinson's disease in the mid-1980s, and he made few public statements afterwards. He eventually achieved a reconciliation with the North Devon Liberal Democrat constituency party, of which he was honorary president from 1988 until his death in 2014. Allegations of suppression of evidence by the police before the trial were under investigation from 2015, culminating in June 2018 when the police said that there was no new evidence and the case would remain closed.