Scandalous

I was just a boy when the Jeremy Thorpe scandal broke. Growing up as a teenager in the seventies was strangely naive experience. Because the sixties had been such a liberating period, full of birth control pills, hallucinogenic drugs, free love and The Beatles openly advocating the holding of hands, the children of the seventies were largely assumed to already know everything that their parents traditionally used to have to sit down and explain to them regarding how they emerged into the world and what the various body parts were for. Indeed, for a time, I assumed that the sex education lessons delivered by my school were, basically, providing information that I was expected to pass on to my parents when I felt that they were good and ready to receive it.

Consequently, the revelations surrounding one of our senior politicians were laughed off as the fantasy of an unhinged sexual deviant making spurious allegations about a twice-married member of parliament and father of one. Norman Scott was everything that a 15 year old boy was desperate not to be. A promiscuous, bi-sexual, weakling who would sell his dignity for money and notoriety. I didn't know it at the time but I was being conditioned to accept that blabber-mouthed poofs like Scott would be the downfall of this country if we didn't have dignified public servants like Jeremy Thorpe to protect us by maintaining a dignified silence on the matter.

Years later, it seems unbelievable that Scott was forced to 'confess' his sin of homosexuality in order to allege attempted murder. Episode 3 of A Very English Scandal (BBC1 Sunday 9pm) will, no doubt, show how the subsequent trial of Mr Thorpe on charges of conspiracy to murder was, in fact, simply turned into a hatchet job on Norman Scott by an establishments Judge who was unwilling to even consider that a member of the Privy Council could be capable of involvement in such a sordid set of circumstances. Peter Cooke's notorious take on the Judge's summing up at the charity comedy review, 'The Secret Policeman's Ball' in 1979, was made all the more satirical by how much of the skit was simply lifted from the actual words used by Sir Joseph Cantley at the time of the trial.

Although this weeks episode descended into a kind of farce, with Blake Harrison from 'The Inbetweeners', cast as bumbling comedy hit-man Andrew Newton, generally the standard of performance has been high. Hugh Grant is immaculate as Thorpe and Ben Wishaw totally believable as the beleaguered Scott. In fact, I suspect that the scenes of Newton using the wrong alias, shooting Scott's dog in anger and generally tripping over his own cock at every opportunity was intentionally clumsy in order to weaken the prosecution testimony when Scott is put in the witness box next week. I recall at the time the 'raised-eyebrow' newspaper reporting which accompanied photographs of Mr Scott during his time as a 'Male Model', a term which, though accurate in both respects, was used euphemistically to indicate a taste for make up and sexual promiscuity.

Ultimately, of course, Thorpe could not withstand the weight of public speculation surrounding his sexuality and, though this was very nearly the 1980's, he was forced into the political wilderness. It seems strange that post-Sex Pistols, post-Emmanuel, post-Watergate, the sexual preferences of an establishment figure like the Leader of the Liberal party was, potentially, serious enough to bring the British political system to its collective knees although, the very title of the drama does perhaps give an indication of why. The word 'English' in A Very English Scandal should be accented heavily. For it was perhaps 'Englishness' that suffered a fatal blow during this period. Englishness stood, drowning vertically, as the great ship of British dignity disappeared below the surface.

Though, perhaps, we all grew up a little and learned to realise that the truth, delivered with an authoritative Oxbridge accent from within Saville Row tailoring, may not be as unquestionably accurate as we once imagined.