Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Book: Rinkagate - The Rise and Fall of Jeremy Thorpe (Bloomsbury, 1996). Simon Freeman and Barrie Penrose

This is a sensational, brilliantly written account of the rise and fall of Jeremy Thorpe, the lying homosexual ex-leader of the Liberal Party. Freeman is the main author although Penrose was the who broke the story - Watergate-style - with his colleague, Roger Courtiour, both originally at the Sunday Times Insight team.

It reads like a John le Carre thriller which is particularly apt since, in le Carre's A Perfect Spy, the haunting father figure Ricky Pym was a Liberal Party candidate in the old-fashioned West Country back in the immediate post-war years. Le Carre must've taken inspiration from the Thorpe/Rinkagate affair as the similarities are too great and Perfect Spy was not written until the 1980s.

Jeremy Thorpe was a brilliant, inspirational leader for the moribund Liberal Party when he joined them in the early 1950s, straight from Oxford. Before that, he had been to school at Eton, hence the hidden, murky homosexual past.

He gained favour in the North Devon local party (centred on Barnstaple and Bideford - the two river towns of the Taw and the Torridge) and became their candidate in the elections of 1955 and 1959, the latter seeing him elected. He eventually replaced Jo Grimond upon the latter's retirement and was a star of the House of Commons, delivering sensational results to the Liberal Party, whose overall, national vote climbed from just 750,000 to over 6 million in the 1974 elections. However, Thorpe had a secret life.

One of the truly great characters of this story is Thorpe's parliamentary colleague, womaniser, conman and bankrupt, Peter Bessell. He was MP for Bodmin at the same time as Thorpe was in his pomp and sort of cheated Thorpe into confiding in him, or so Freeman says. He is an amazing person to hear about, a sort of Ricky Pym.

You can't entirely blame Thorpe: it was not legal until 1967 so he couldn't let anyone know.

Thorpe's feud with Norman Scott was to destroy him in the end, aided by a few years of blunders. I've heard stories about this bloke Scott hanging around Exeter, just 20 miles from where he lives in Throwleigh, near Okehampton.

Great book, fascinating read.