- Paperback: 408 pages
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; New edition edition (17 July 1997)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0747533393
- ISBN-13: 978-0747533399
- Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 13 x 3.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 407,520 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
At 2:34pm on Friday 22 June 1979, the jurors in what had been billed as "The Trial of the Century" filed into Number One Court at the Old Bailey to deliver the verdict on the Rt Hon Jeremy Thorpe, Privy Counsellor, the former MP for North Devon and ex-leader of the Liberal Party. For 30 days, the nine men and three women of the jury had listened, opened-mouthed, like the rest of the country and many millions abroad, as prosecution lawyers tried to prove that Thorpe and three other men had recruited an airline pilot called Andrew Newton to kill Norman Scott, a former male model who claimed that he had once been Thorpe's lover. It had been an extraordinary trial. The star witnesses were Scott, Peter Bessell, a former Liberal MP and failed businessman who had once been Thorpe's confidant, and Newton, who had shot Scott's dog, a Great Dane bitch called Rinka, but failed to murder Scott as ordered. Mr Justice Cantley, the judge, was not impressd with these witnesses and made it clear that, if there was any justice, they should have been in the dock.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
SOME called it the British Watergate, although it was hardly in the Nixon league of abuse of position and power. In 1975, on a lonely moor in Devon, a Great Dane called Rinka was shot as she tried to protect her owner, horse trainer Norman Scott, from a gunman hell-bent on killing him, former airline steward Andrew Newton. Why did Newton try to kill Scott? Many suspected it was because of Scott's repeated claim that he'd been seduced by Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, who wanted to silence him once and for all. In 1979, Jeremy Thorpe was cleared of conspiracy to murder at the Old Bailey. Yet many felt that the trial was a whitewash, an orchestrated cover-up by the Establishment who wished to protect Thorpe. Now, years later and with Thorpe's eagerly-awaited memoirs due to be printed, Simon Freeman has teamed up with the man who broke the story, Barrie Penrose, to re-evaluate the Thorpe affair once and for all. And his conclusions are not the sort of thing Mr. Thorpe's lawyers would approve of. The story begins with Thorpe's childhood and schooldays, going on through his early political career at Oxford, where he backstabbed his way to President of the Union, and then it gets interesting. Thorpe's rise to power is superbly documented, as is that fateful night in 1961 when Thorpe allegedly seduced a young stable-boy called Norman Josiffe. Josiffe, aka Scott, never forgot that supposed encounter no matter how hard Thorpe tried to. The rest of the book follows their parallel lives - Thorpe's culminating in being hours away from a Cabinet post and Scott's with repeated nervous breakdowns. Scott hounded Thorpe over the next decade, telling his story to anyone who would hear. The scandal was about to break when a Great Dane was shot in Devon. Coincidence? So the jury would have us believe. But Freeman and Penrose stick to their guns. Neither of the protagonists in the book are portrayed heroically. Thorpe is depicted as a waspish closet homosexual while Scott comes across as a lonely neurotic more at home with animals than humans. The story of how Penrose and his colleague Roger Courtoir broke the story is also included - reccomended reading for any would-be journalist, as is the BBC's ham-fisted attempt to gag the pair. The trial itself recieves only limited coverage, while the actions of Judge Cantley who practically ordered the jury to acquit Thorpe are contemptuously judged themselves. 'Rinkagate' is a superb read ...
Tony Mullen, Goldsmiths' College, University of London 8.3.99
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
The Jeremy Thorpe affair is perhaps one of the most complex scandals ever with a myriad subplots including The Postcard, The Missing Suitcase, The Insurance Card, The Dog-In-A_Fog. At the time (the late seventies) the story was never really reported as it should have been, partly due to its complexity, partly due to the inclusion of (in reality non-existent) South African and Security Service dimensions and partly because of a desire to see it as The British Watergate, rather than what it actually is which is a tragi-comic bathetic masterpiece of British bumbling in which high ranking Liberal homosexuals (of the hypocritical old school) embezzle funds from kindly Bahamian millionaires and plot to murder histrionic, animal loving, cooky ex Male Models aided and abetted by a cast of bent solicitors, hypnotising GPs, paranoid ex Prime Ministers and Walter Mittyesque failed airline pilots cum Hitmen. It's a plot that would have left Joe Orton gasping. The author sensibly decides not to overplay his material (which is wise. Was Thorpe guilty as charged (famously he was acquitted)? The author makes a fairly damning case but whatever actually happened I enjoyed this book most of all as a fantastic story. It would meake a great comic opera or a terrfic film!
5 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
How is it possible to make the Jeremy Thorpe story seem boring and dull? I don't know the answer - but somehow Simon Freeman has managed it - five hundred pages of verbiose junk, which requires great dedication to plough through, and which, amazingly for such a long book, doesn't even manage to get to the truth of who Thorpe was or whether he was involved in any kind of plot. His early years are treated in the most cursory way (we never learn why someone from such a privileged background should become a compassionate Leftie, for instance.)
But it is the book's obsession with dirt that is its real problem. It has a prurience that is tasteless and cruel - one of the author's visits Thorpe and seems almost pleased to find him in poor ill-health. Throughout, the authors clearly rejoice in his misfortune.
As a piece of journalism the book is discredited by its own sources - ancient notes from a prosecution witnesses who was found to be a total liar, bits of tittle-tattle from anonymous
enemies of Thorpe.
The story of Thorpe's fall is not funny, as the authors seem to think, and this book tells us more about them than it does its subject.
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