A Very English Scandal - BBC1

[Pianorak]

Who would have thought Hugh Grant would develop into an excellent character actor?

Another thumbs up for Michael Frayn's Pocket Playhouse, Episode 1 (of 4) today R4 11.30. Funny, witty, clever writing - brilliantly acted.

[Lat-Literal]

Yes indeed, vinteuil posted the link. The actual judicial summing up almost, but not quite, defied parody. A different era.

I see from today's Times that Lord Carlisle says Emlyn Hooson is misrepresented....but, as the Liberal party is part of the joke in this story, it's difficult to take their protestations too seriously - Lembit Opik [ ] also says Hooson is misrepresented.

Lubricious

English rather than British?

Carlile who shared a HOC office with Cyril Smith and described Greville Janner as a person of integrity has a somewhat distinctive position in British society. From 2001 as the UK's Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation he was notable for supporting the introduction of control orders, a controversial measure for stereotypical liberals, and after an affair he married Alison Levitt in 2007 who became a senior legal adviser to the Director of Public Prosecutions. That repositioning is all ultra establishment and only in some ways easily predictable. And while the Thorpe scandal was very English in a certain tradition - Profumo, Stonehouse etc - I think younger people would need to know the extent to which it was pivotal in the shifting tides of British politics and culture to have a fuller comprehension. That is significantly more substantial than if one individual is being wrongly portrayed or not.

First, the politics. Thorpe, who stood out to the general public in an age of increasingly televised politics as charismatic and, within measure, dramatic had been the very natural successor to Grimond as the leader of the Liberal Party who himself had built support with charm. Indeed, Thorpe nearly got the Liberals into Coalition Government. Following the scandal, Steel defeated Pardoe and a key reason was that he was regarded as more of a standard manager. Nothing flashy. Pardoe, a very good mind, fair, entertaining and with the potential to have been the most genuinely charming leader of them all had, in the circumstances, just a few too many am-dram leanings. But he might well have pulled in more support at a crucial time in the eighties from small c conservatives who had big issues with Steel on his earlier championing of abortion and to some extent the SDP's Jenkins on homosexuality.

The legacy of the Thorpe affair goes further into the appointment of Ashdown. The decision to have a macho and unequivocally heterosexual Liberal leader was a direct response to all that had gone before. In each case, the centre of politics was able to keep the Labour Left out of Government but neither provided the right combination of ingredients to enable the Tory governments to be booted from office. The one other possible effective route through for the centre was Penhaligon but when Steel was elected he was insufficiently senior and by 1988 he would never have been preferred to an evident establishment swashbuckler. He was in a sense the Charles Kennedy of his time and like him died tragically young - in 1986.

As for the cultural aspects, the scandal introduced homosexuality to the news like nothing that ever preceded it. In contrast, Jenkins's legal reforms less than a decade earlier had been treated as something of a footnote and not only in the media. For example, in the hundreds of pages of Harold Wilson's diary, it barely gets a short paragraph. So the scandal was not so much received as being about a politician's waywardness - all of that had been done and heard before - but rather the nature of the sexual aspects and all of the overtness in the reporting which was not at that time especially English at all. And it wasn't just right wingers who disliked it. So did old style socialists. Wily Wilson who was not a prejudiced man and who had in his way fully supported Jenkins on sexual reform also knew how to operate so that the Labour Party could maximise its electoral appeal. So he would have known that well.

John Pardoe - Desert Island Discs - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009mtbg

Remembering: David Penhaligon - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6VMFLfILgE

[Serial_Apologist]

A big thumbs-up for all the characterisations: where did they manage to find a Whishaw to play Scott, when such young "snowflakes" of that distinctive kind, ubiquitous at that time, have become more of a rarity? And for once they've got the "sartorials" of the period absolutely spot on!

[Nick Armstrong]

Carlile who shared a HOC office with Cyril Smith and described Greville Janner as a person of integrity has a somewhat distinctive position in British society.

I once briefed Alex Carlile QC (as he then was): I think your adjective "distinctive" is well-chosen, and of course not necessarily complimentary!

Who would have thought Hugh Grant would develop into an excellent character actor?

And of course there's the added frisson of his own sexual scandal - who can forget his awkward and shamefaced LAPD mugshot...

[Lat-Literal]

I once briefed Alex Carlile QC (as he then was): I think your adjective "distinctive" is well-chosen, and of course not necessarily complimentary!

Not necessarily.

[vinteuil]

And for once they've got the "sartorials" of the period absolutely spot on!

... haven't they though! A delight - I expect the Thorpe ginger greatcoat will be much in demand.

(My pa always said "never trust a man with a velveteen half-collar!" - (what was that you said? - 'Nigel Farage' - ah... ) )

And the interiors too - the ghastly offices of Peter Bex-Bissell!


.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

And of course there's the added frisson of his own sexual scandal - who can forget his awkward and shamefaced LAPD mugshot...

Indeed - although no animals were harmed in the making of that scandal.

[Serial_Apologist]

Indeed - although no animals were harmed in the making of that scandal.

Wasn't some doggerel written at the time? I seem to remember.

[Serial_Apologist]

My pa always said "never trust a man with a velveteen half-collar!".

After my own father's passing, an antiques dealer came round - courtesy the undertakers, would you belieeeeeeeve it! - offering to "help me out" pending the arrival of the probate!! He had a sidekick who wore such a coat - and Jeremy Thrope [Private Eye sic] style trilby, come to think of it. "Nice bit of Chippendale you 'ave there if you don't mind me sayin', Mister ....?". With a bit of added culture, George Cole probably modelled his Minder on JT.

[Petrushka]

I remember Petrushka saying he had a similar experience, was it at a Prom [? - if you're reading this. Pet ]

Yes, it was at a 1995 Prom (RCO/Chailly, Mahler 1). I was sitting on the back row of 'O' stalls when Thorpe came and sat in the very next seat to mine, accompanied by Marion and Donald Mitchell. Thorpe was clearly quite ill by then with Parkinsons and, like you, I made no attempt at conversation. To be honest, I found it all rather disconcerting.

[LMcD]

It's now been reported that the 'hit-man', previously thought to have died, may in fact still be alive. The plot thickens.....

[Lat-Literal]

It's now been reported that the 'hit-man', previously thought to have died, may in fact still be alive. The plot thickens.....

Perhaps the first question to ask about the uncertainty is "how could he have been outside documentation?" - birth, marriage and death certificates, passport, driving licence, tax returns, television licence, bus passes, credit cards and credit ratings, etc? He changed his name to Hann Redwin and romanced a rich company director called Rosalieve Lowsley.

Perhaps oddly, there was a case involving "Lowsley and Another" before the House of Lords:

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199798/ldjudgmt/jd980729/lowsley.htm

And he was enjoying holidays in the Alps as early as 1994 when his home was in Chiswick:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/no-foul-play-in-eiger-death-1403009.html

What are the odds on him originally having been black and that his parents were on Windrush?

Or that anyone has bothered much to touch the void?

[Lat-Literal]

Pilot chatter:

teeteringahead - 6 December 2014 - (Thorpe, had he been in a Heath Cabinet, was) widely believed to have been Foreign Secretary. Particularly interesting as the first news of his - er - interests came to the Security Service from the FBI, after Thorpe (allegedly) had an "incident" with an NYC rent boy which came to the FBI's notice - and that would have been in Hoover's time too!

VP959 - 6 December 2014 - By a very bizarre coincidence, I ended up doing some work for Hann Redwin around 10 years ago. He was living in West London and was interested in an aircraft kit, and sought some advice on getting it through airworthiness approval. I had absolutely no idea he was in any way connected with the Thorpe affair at all, but do remember thinking that he was a bit eccentric. Somewhere I still have a file about his proposed project, but I never actually met him, I only spoke to him on the phone a few times and exchanged a few letters. I do remember he kept trying to persuade me to have a meeting with him in London, but I couldn't spare the time. I didn't hear any more from him and having just Googled his name I now know why; he died in 2005, not that long after our last exchange of correspondence.

richjp - 10 December 2014 - Hann Redwin was alive and well four years ago, because I spoke to him! He used to attend various modern jive or ceroc venues in west London which is where I first met him. He struck up a conversation with me in a pub afterwards one evening and I had a few brief chats with him subsequently. I certainly found him a bit unusual to say the least and when someone told me who he really was, I stayed clear of him from then on. I stopped going to those venues about seven years ago but then bumped into him by chance in a bar in London four years ago. I could not avoid him so just had a short how are you type conversation and moved on. He always looked like the sort of bloke who exercised regularly to keep fit and he looked fine on that occasion, although obviously illness can bring anyone down. The Telegraph obviously has got something wrong even if it is just the date of his death. Who knows, perhaps he has changed his name again and engineered his own disappearance?

And a 2015 Encounter with Andrew Newton - http://liberalengland.blogspot.com/2...ew-newton.html

[Nick Armstrong]

It's now been reported that the 'hit-man', previously thought to have died, may in fact still be alive. The plot thickens.....

Detailed segment about it all on BBC News 24 - doubtless to be repeated hourly throughout the day. Part "info-mercial" for tomorrow's final episode and documentary (Tom Mangold features heavily in the report), but covering the possible survival of Newton.

In my lawyering days, I had a case concerning another notorious 'very British scandal' in which an organ of the media had proceeded on the basis that all relevant people had died (and hence libel was not a risk as far as they were concerned) only to find that after publication, one of them popped up very much alive, having simply retired to Australia, and promptly sued the entity for libel. A very interesting case indeed, it was.....

I wonder if the lawyers who cleared the Thorpe drama for the BBC on the basis that Newton had died are sweating slightly today

[Richard Tarleton]

The final episode on Sunday is to be followed, at 10pm on BBC4, by an updated version of the Panorama programme which was prepared in 1979 for broadcast immediately after the trial, in the confident expectation of a different verdict , but which couldn't be shown. Tom Mangold, now 82, presents. He was ordered to destroy all copies by the DG at the time, but kept one, on VHS, which he later transferred to CD, which was nearly eaten by his dog. Sounds even more remarkable than the TV series, and includes interviews with Scott, Newton and Bissell.