It would take an electron microscope to measure the average American's interest in British politics. There might be a Streepish Maggie Thatcher on the radar, or a poor-little-rich-girl Diana, but to the average Yank with any capacity for denial, even Tony Blair might seem little more than a smudge on history, which, come to think of it, may not be far off the mark. It doesn't exactly make one proud to be an American to consider how few countrymen could name Britain's current prime minister.
As I write, campaigning, with its usual depredations, is convulsing the UK. This is one reason Michael Bloch's Jeremy Thorpe (Little, Brown & Co.), a masterly biography of the man who, in January 1967, at 37, became, Bloch writes, "the youngest leader of a British Parliamentary party [the now-defunct Liberals, more or less reconstituted as today's Liberal Democrats] since mass politics had begun a century earlier," is timely. Still, it would not have been wasted on most British readers that Bloch's book appeared, not at all accidentally, less than two weeks after Thorpe's death, of Parkinson's, on December 4 last year.
Thorpe had given Bloch extensive one-on-one interviews and access to documents and knowledgeable intimates, yielding a manuscript that Thorpe declared would appear only over his dead body. Given the extent to which Thorpe's flamboyant political life was a matter of public record, it's likely that most – but not all – of what he wanted to come out only posthumously were the details of his extravagant, edgy and ultimately career-destroying escapades as a wildly promiscuous homosexual.
Reading only the sex parts of Bloch's 500-plus-page biography won't save you that much time, and the author makes the whole of the story spellbinding. Readers with prurient interests may go directly to the chapters "Tendencies," "Norman," "Edge," "Prosecution" and "Trial," titles that plot the sex storyline concisely. But in a book that gives every evidence of having been composed over a long time, Bloch gives a richly detailed yet strikingly balanced portrait of a floridly unbalanced politician whose life could be summed up as the dubious privileges of privilege.
The descendent of a family in which same-sexuality and mental illness were as common and conspicuous as breakfast, Thorpe sought, and prodigiously found, sex with men from his own (uncertain, but peerage-inclined) class to the beautiful, young, available men of the lower classes that have always comforted, and sometimes troubled, homosexuals of certain dispositions and some means. The stories are jaw-dropping, or at least jaw-loosening, and readers on our side of the Atlantic won't be surprised at the several references to Thorpe's visit to San Francisco on official, U.S. State Department-sponsored business in San Francisco in 1961, when, Bloch notes, Thorpe wrote to associates (on official House of Commons stationery, as was his wont), "expressing his delight at the 'gay' (he already uses the word) life of San Francisco, in which he had joyously indulged and from which he had found it hard to tear himself away." In San Francisco, and thereafter, there's "Bruno" and a subsequent FBI investigation, but these are reasons to read the book.
San Franciscans may hear uncomfortable echoes of Harvey Milk's troubled relationship with Jack Lira in the "Norman" episodes, with the notable exception that the out Milk did not have the vulnerability to career-ending accusations of homosexuality, which was still illegal in Britain in Thorpe's heyday, but which he could easily have got away with by being less outrageous. A stable-boy named Norman Josiffe when Thorpe met him in 1960, the mysteriously handsome, clearly disturbed, borderline personality morphed into a sometime-model who renamed himself Norman Scott. Their relationship, which Scott claimed was sexual and Thorpe implausibly insisted was not (there's a lot about Vaseline here), was short by normal-people's standards, longish by Thorpe's, and over the ensuing two decades, all but literally lethal for both men. When Thorpe was at the height of his political sway, the ever-impecunious Scott tried to extort (more) major money with threats of spilling the considerable goods. When the threats became strong enough, it appears, a solution hastily – but out loud – articulated by Thorpe was to have him killed, the murky results of which were a bungled attempt on Scott's life by a hitman, who in the event killed only Scott's dog, Rinka. Hence the trial for attempted murder and conspiracy, in which a defeated Thorpe legally prevailed, Scott was publicly dressed down, and the Liberal Party died.
Bloch rarely psychologizes, and when he quotes others doing so, provides evidence pro and con. The wary reader will notice the steady attention he draws to Thorpe's uncanny ability to mimic – not just to do a good Winston Churchill when properly sloshed, but, as an undergraduate, to be able to imitate every classmate at the table after a single lunch – and to otherwise entertain. Also, Bloch writes, "A problem which dogged Jeremy from the outset of his career was lack of money," though he somehow always got along.
Not lost in all the tawdriness is Thorpe's political record, which saw considerable work to overturn the laws criminalizing homosexuality in Britain, some very real championing of underdogs not named Rinka, other work that led to the creation of Amnesty International, and much else. Nor is there overlooked his post-leadership, if too-little-too-late marriages and engagements with women he demonstrably loved.
I suspect that what will give this astonishing book such resonance as it will have on this side of the pond is the collective gloom of people of liberal and progressive slants, that inescapable sense of having been betrayed by the people with high-flying principles they elected.