The damning, shocking, depressing life of Jeremy Thorpe

Little, Brown, pp.606, £25

The back story of Michael Bloch’s biography of Jeremy Thorpe is a story in itself.  The book’s appearance, in the same month as its subject’s death, is only possible because it has been on ice for many years. In the 1990s the author had numerous meetings with the former Liberal party leader and gained access to many of his circle with a view to writing a vaguely official biography. But after reading a draft in the 1990s Thorpe said words to the effect of ‘over my dead body’, and this took longer to come about than expected. Thorpe died last month at the age of 85.

In the early 1980s, just after his downfall, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and is now said to have had the longest case on record, causing in turn probably the lengthiest and most obscure political twilight in British politics. And so, newly deceased though he is, he seems a figure from another age. I saw him once in London, perhaps 15 years ago, and felt like I’d seen a ghost even then. While reading this absorbing book I tried his name out on a range of people. Of those in their twenties and thirties none (including some serious politicos) had ever heard of him. ‘The head of the Liberal party was on trial for conspiracy to murder?’ they tended to exclaim at some stage in my explanation. There often followed the tragic question ‘And who was Rinka?’.  Among those who did remember Thorpe in his time everyone said they had never trusted him. Some claimed it was the waistcoats, others the hats. But everyone knew there was something more to tell.

So for once the use of the phrase ‘long awaited’ is truthful. Though there are sadnesses around the delay, caused not least by the number of people looking forward to this publication who predeceased Thorpe.