Obituary: Jeremy Thorpe

Mention his name and another one immediately springs to mind, that of Norman Scott. Scott, a former male model, made persistent claims that he had an affair with Thorpe in the early 1960s, but the matter provoked massive national interest when a former airline pilot, Andrew Newton, claimed he had been paid £5,000 by Liberal Party supporters to kill Scott. He said he deliberately bungled the plot and shot Scott's dog instead.

Thorpe, along with three other accused, found himself at the Old Bailey on a charge of conspiracy to murder and, while all four were acquitted in June 1979, after a sensational trial which lasted several months, his political career was in ruins.

John Jeremy Thorpe was born into a family that was strongly Tory in tradition. His father was a Conservative MP at one time for a Manchester seat, and his maternal grandfather also was a Tory MP, rejoicing in the name Empire Jack.

Thorpe was educated in America for three years and then went to Eton, but he was increasingly coming under an outside influence during those formative years which was to prove much more powerful than either of those experiences.

Megan Lloyd George knew Thorpe's mother, and frequent visits to the Lloyd George household nurtured ideals that turned him into a committed Liberal before he went to Oxford.

The judgements made on Thorpe by contemporaries at Oxford were hard, and he made enemies of people like William Rees Mogg, who went on to become editor of The Times, with his single-minded pursuit of office.

According to one source, shortly after his arrival at Trinity College, Thorpe informed a local journalist that he intended to become chairman of the Liberal Club, chairman of the university law society and president of the Union. What is more, he set out a timetable for achieving those targets.

His contemporaries found it unforgivable that he not only fulfilled his ambitions but did so within the timetable. There was a fuss about the results after every election according to Mr Rees Mogg, a defeated candidate in the election for president of the Union in 1951, but the Oxford experience gave Thorpe an appetite for political intrigue which never really left him.

He entered parliament as MP for North Devon in 1959 and held it until he was thumped by the Tories by 8,000 votes in the May 1979 General Election which swept Margaret Thatcher to power.

There was much speculation over whether he would seek the nomination to fight the seat again, but he announced in October 1979 that he did not wish to be re-adopted.

Thorpe was leader of the Liberal Party from 1967 to 1976, during which time he steered it to arguably one of the most successful periods in the party's history. The Liberals took six million votes in the election of February, 1974 and were offered, but turned down, the chance of a coalition by Ted Heath. They were less successful in the October election of that year, but still were a force to be reckoned with.

Much of their success was put down to Thorpe's flamboyant style and debating skills, but he appeared to make less of an impression within the party itself, where he was said to be uncommunicative and capable of outbursts of nasty temper. He was renowned for campaigning in "dandified" clothes, and for mimicry and jokes, but even his supporters wondered whether underneath all that he actually had a political philosophy.

In any case, it all went sour in the wake of his trial, with various allegations being levelled at him for years afterwards. One real hiccup centred on a private report to the party executive of a 1979 committee of inquiry into party funds.

The inquiry found that £20,000 raised by Thorpe from Bahamas millionaire Jack Hayward was never used for Liberal election expenses and was never reported to the party. After his trial, Thorpe repaid the sum to Mr Hayward and the executive decided to drop the matter, but it was reported that they took the decision on the assumption that Thorpe planned to retire from public life, which he effectively did.

He was elected president of the North Devon Liberal Association in April, 1987, and had a brief spell in 1982 as director of the British section of Amnesty International. It was his first job since his acquittal, but there was a massive backlash within Amnesty that he was unsuitable, the organisation's council voted by only 11 votes to nine to keep him, and he resigned from the £14,000-a-year post after only a few weeks because of the campaign against him.

Thorpe, who suffered from Parkinson's disease in his later years, married his first wife, Caroline, in May 1968, and they had one son, Rupert Jeremy, who was born in 1969. A year later, Caroline was killed in a road accident, and Thorpe married his second wife, Marion, in 1973.

Thorpe was probably the archetypal Liberal, and may well have gone on to achieve a great deal more in politics but for the stresses and strains of his trial and its aftermath, despite his acquittal. He once was described as a brilliant orator but a political lightweight, a label which tended to stick. But as he said in an interview on one occasion: "I enjoyed politicking enormously - the Machiavellian aspect."

He is survived by his son . Marion died earlier this year.