The Thorpe Affair: Murder Plot, a Dead Dog, and the Trial That Shook British Politics
- Oct 12, 2024
- 8 min read
In October 1975, a Great Dane called Rinka was shot dead on a dark stretch of road on Exmoor. Her owner, Norman Scott, survived only because the hitman's gun jammed. The man who had allegedly ordered the hit was Jeremy Thorpe, leader of the Liberal Party and one of the most charismatic politicians in Britain. It sounds like the plot of a bad thriller. It wasn't.
The Thorpe affair is one of the most extraordinary political scandals in British history. It had everything: a secret homosexual relationship, letters written on House of Commons notepaper, a bungled assassination attempt, a corrupt financial trail, and a trial at the Old Bailey that the press called "the greatest show on Earth." And at the end of it, Thorpe walked free.
The BBC dramatised the whole thing in 2018 as A Very English Scandal, written by Russell T. Davies and starring Hugh Grant as Thorpe and Ben Whishaw as Scott. It won three BAFTAs and introduced the story to a new generation. But the real thing was stranger, uglier, and considerably funnier than anything drama could quite capture.
A Rising Star With Something to Hide
Jeremy Thorpe was born in 1929 into a political family. Both his father and grandfather had been Conservative MPs, but Thorpe chose the Liberals and proved a natural. He won the North Devon seat in 1959 and was impossible to ignore: eloquent, charming, and almost unnervingly confident. In 1967, at just 37, he became the youngest leader of any major British party in a century.
What very few people knew was that Thorpe had been hiding a dangerous secret for years. In the early 1960s he'd become involved with a troubled young man named Norman Josiffe, who later took the name Norman Scott. Scott had a difficult background: family breakdown, brushes with the law, a history of severe depression, and a suicide attempt before the two met. According to Scott, their relationship became sexual. Thorpe denied any such relationship, but he did take a persistent interest in Scott's welfare, arranging accommodation and employment while keeping his distance.
The most absurd thread running through the whole affair is Scott's National Insurance card. Thorpe had apparently taken it, meaning Scott couldn't claim benefits or secure steady work. Scott never stopped demanding it back. At one point during his trial testimony, Scott insisted he wasn't trying to destroy Thorpe at all. He just wanted his National Insurance card sorted out. "National Insurance is my lifeblood!" he reportedly declared from the witness box.
Keeping the Lid On
For more than a decade, Thorpe managed to suppress the story. The British press of the 1960s was more compliant than it would later become, and Thorpe had allies willing to help. His close friend and fellow Liberal MP Peter Bessell was given the job of dealing with Scott directly. Bessell met with Scott, warned him that his threats could be construed as blackmail, and eventually began paying Scott a retainer of £5 a week to keep him quiet.
Meanwhile Thorpe had been writing letters. One, penned on House of Commons notepaper and signed "Yours affectionately, Jeremy," contained the baffling line: "Bunnies can (and will) go to France." Scott carried these letters around in a suitcase. Thorpe's associates spent years trying to get hold of them..
Despite the cover-up, Scott kept making waves. He wrote to Thorpe's mother. He went to the police. He told journalists. Nothing stuck. The Liberal Party was enjoying a genuine surge in popularity in the early 1970s, winning over six million votes at the February 1974 general election. Just before that result came in, Thorpe had been in serious talks about forming a coalition with the Conservatives. He came very close to becoming Home Secretary. The man responsible for law enforcement across Britain nearly had an alleged murder plot on his hands.
The Money Trail
Alongside the cover-up of the affair itself, Thorpe was running a parallel financial operation that would later prove just as damaging. In the wake of the February 1974 election, he wrote to Sir Jack Hayward, a Bahamas-based millionaire businessman who had been a generous donor to the Liberal Party, asking for £50,000 to replenish party funds.
Thorpe requested that £10,000 of this be sent not to the party's regular accounts but to a Channel Islands businessman named Nadir Dinshaw. Dinshaw was a blameless Parsi philanthropist with no idea what the money was really for. He passed it on to Thorpe's ally David Holmes as instructed. The same arrangement was used again after the October 1974 election. In total, £20,000 of Hayward's donations (equivalent to around £237,000 today) was secretly diverted away from the Liberal Party and towards Holmes.
It was David Steel, the Liberal MP who would eventually succeed Thorpe as party leader, who found out about the Dinshaw payments through a personal connection. He confronted Thorpe and told him to resign. Thorpe refused. The money trail, combined with the Scott allegations, was what finally made his position untenable.
The Plot to Kill Norman Scott
By 1974, Thorpe and his inner circle had apparently had enough of Scott. According to testimony at the later trial, Thorpe had reportedly compared the situation to "shooting a sick dog" and suggested Scott needed to be "dealt with." One alleged plan involved shooting Scott in Cornwall and disposing of the body down a disused mine shaft. Poison was rejected as a method because, as Bessell later testified, "it would raise too many questions if he fell dead off a barstool."
The scheme that actually moved forward involved Holmes hiring a middleman named John Deakin, who recruited a small-time criminal and airline pilot called Andrew Newton. Newton was paid to kill Scott.
On 24 October 1975, Newton collected Scott from Combe Martin in north Devon, on the pretext of driving him to safety from a supposed assassin. Scott brought Rinka with him. Newton was afraid of dogs but couldn't say so. They drove to Porlock, where Newton left them at a hotel briefly, then collected them again after 8pm. On a deserted stretch of road on the moor above Porlock Hill, Newton stopped the car, feigning exhaustion. As Scott got out to take the wheel, Newton produced a gun and shot Rinka dead. He then pointed the weapon at Scott. It jammed.
Scott ran. Newton drove off. A local AA patrolman, Ted Lethaby, found Scott weeping beside Rinka's body shortly afterwards. The story reached the West Somerset Free Press the following week under the headline: "The Great Dane Mystery: Dog-in-a-Fog Case Baffles Police."
The Scandal Goes Public
Scott's account of the shooting didn't get major national traction at first. But by 1976 the press was piecing things together, and Thorpe's position became untenable. In May 1976 he resigned as Liberal leader, still denying any wrongdoing. He retained his parliamentary seat and continued to deny everything.
A police investigation eventually led to Thorpe and three others being charged in August 1978 with conspiracy to murder. Thorpe faced the additional charge of incitement to murder, making him the first sitting MP in British history to face a murder charge. The pre-trial committal hearing in Minehead that November was a circus, with the national media descending on the Somerset market town in force.
The Trial of the Century
The trial proper began at the Old Bailey on 8 May 1979, just five days after Thorpe had lost his North Devon seat in the general election, beaten by a Conservative by over 8,500 votes. In the build-up to election day, Private Eye's Auberon Waugh had stood as a candidate for the newly formed "Dog Lovers' Party." His campaign address ended: "Rinka is NOT forgotten. Rinka lives. Woof, woof. Vote Waugh to give all dogs the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Thorpe obtained an injunction preventing distribution of Waugh's literature. Waugh received 79 votes.
The prosecution depended on three main witnesses: Norman Scott, Peter Bessell, and Andrew Newton. None of them made it easy.
Bessell's credibility was shredded by defence barrister George Carman, who revealed that Bessell had signed a contract with The Sunday Telegraph paying him £25,000 if Thorpe was acquitted, and £50,000 if he was convicted. The office of the Director of Public Prosecutions had, almost unbelievably, consented to this arrangement. Under cross-examination, Bessell admitted to being "a compulsive liar" with "a credibility problem." The Sunday Telegraph cancelled the contract mid-trial after watching him in the witness box.
Scott's erratic courtroom manner didn't help the prosecution either. Newton, who might have provided the most damning evidence, was written off by the judge as a perjurer and a "chump, determined to milk the case as hard as he can."
Thorpe did not testify. Neither did Holmes. Their defence rested on the argument that the prosecution's witnesses were simply too unreliable to convict on.
Judge Cantley's Summing-Up
The judge, Sir Joseph Cantley, delivered a summing-up that became notorious in its own right. He praised Thorpe's "distinguished public record" at length, then turned to the prosecution witnesses with language more suited to a pub argument than a court of law. Bessell was "a humbug." Newton was "a perjurer and a chump." As for Scott: "He is a fraud. He is a sponger. He is a whiner. He is a parasite. But of course he could still be telling the truth. It is a question of belief."
The bias was so naked that Peter Cook immediately recorded a spoken-word parody of the summing-up that became one of the most celebrated pieces of his career. Cantley's conclusion, that the mystery of the diverted £20,000 was irrelevant because "the fact that a man obtains money by deceit does not prove that the man was a member of a conspiracy," raised eyebrows in court.
The jury was initially split 6-6. After 52 hours of deliberation, all four defendants were acquitted on 22 June 1979. Thorpe called the verdict "a complete vindication."
Aftermath: Where Are They Now?
Thorpe's wife Marion stood by him throughout and nursed him through a subsequent diagnosis of Parkinson's disease that effectively ended his public life. He published his memoirs in 1999, under the title In My Own Time. He did not address the Norman Scott affair. He died in 2014.
Newton, the hitman, spent years assumed dead by police before being traced to a cul-de-sac in Dorking, Surrey, living under the name Hann Redwin. When Gwent Police interviewed him in 2018 after reopening the inquiry, they concluded he had no new information to offer.
Norman Scott is still alive. Now in his eighties, he has continued to speak publicly about the affair over the decades, maintaining his account has never changed. When the BBC dramatisation aired in 2018, he had mixed feelings. He told The Irish News he felt he was being portrayed as "this poor, mincing, little gay person," adding: "I also come across as a weakling and I've never been a weakling." He has also said he cried watching parts of it. Whatever one makes of his account, Scott spent years being dismissed, humiliated, and legally character-assassinated by an establishment that closed ranks around one of its own. The verdict in 1979 settled the legal question. It didn't settle the historical one.
Is A Very English Scandal a True Story?
Yes, broadly. The 2018 BBC series written by Russell T. Davies and directed by Stephen Frears is based on John Preston's 2016 book of the same name, which draws on court records, interviews, and contemporaneous reporting. Hugh Grant plays Thorpe and Ben Whishaw plays Scott. The major events, the relationship, the murder plot, the Rinka shooting, the trial, and the acquittal, are all factually grounded. Some scenes and dialogue are necessarily dramatised for television, but the essential shape of the story is accurate. Preston's book, and the series, are probably the most complete and accessible account of the affair available.
For more political scandal, corruption, and crimes of the British aristocracy, see our piece on the disappearance of Lord Lucan. And for another case of establishment power and murky legal proceedings, read about Lord Bob Boothby, his friendship with Ronnie Kray, and a lifetime of scandal.
Sources
6. Preston, John. A Very English Scandal. Viking, 2016.
