The liberal judgement of history

Jeremy Thorpe, the late Liberal leader, was arguably the greatest leader of his party since David Lloyd George.  But whereas Lloyd George's scandals, both pecuniary and romantic, were water off a duck's back, Thorpe's sunk him.  As Harold Macmillan chopped and changed his cabinet in a desperate bid to save his premiership in the wake of the Profumo affair, Thorpe quipped, in a paraphrase of the Gospel of John (15:13): "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life."  Yet in the twentieth century, it was his scandal that could rival it - that he wasn't in government and leader of a then very minor party meant it did not eclipse Profumo.  A celebrated epigrammatist like Oscar Wilde, he too came a cropper in court - even his own lawyer, the horrible wifebeater but brilliant barrister, George Carman, QC, said to the jury that an acquittal (of trying to kill an alleged homosexual lover) was not a presumption of innocence, merely that the prosecution had failed to make its case.
It all started with Thorpe meeting Norman Scott (né Josiffe) who would later be characterised as a lying, whinging  parasite.  His relationship with Thorpe was always a matter of some debate, but the Liberal leader said it was not sexual, a line which the press took that he doth protest too much.  Eventually, it became so convoluted that Thorpe was accused of hiring a hitman to bump off Scott (and his dog - the pooch bought it) in a bid to stop Scott blackmailing him.  Thorpe didn't take the stand himself - a wise move since so many vain people do so and unwittingly incriminate themselves (as Wilde did, as well as the chairman of Enron).  The voters of his North Devon constituency delivered their own verdict - having lost the leadership in 1975 over the affair, they kicked him out at the 1979 General Election, in the prime of his political life - he never made a comeback.  More than anything else he ever did, it is Thorpe's misfortune to be forever associated with his greatest humiliation.  Maybe history will be kinder - if it is Whiggish certainly more likely.