Jeremy Thorpe, a charismatic British politician who briefly revived the fortunes of his country’s Liberal Party before his political career was destroyed by a scandal involving allegations of a homosexual relationship and of a murder conspiracy to keep it quiet, died on Thursday. He was 85.
His son, Rupert, announced the death, saying that Mr. Thorpe had struggled with Parkinson’s disease for more than 30 years. No other details were given.
On June 22, 1979, after a monthlong trial that attracted worldwide attention, Mr. Thorpe was found not guilty on charges of conspiring to murder Norman Scott, a former stable hand and male model. Three co-defendants were also acquitted.
But the acquittals came too late to save Mr. Thorpe’s political career. The scandal had already cost him his seat in Parliament, which he had held for 20 years, representing the North Devon district in the far west of England, and forced him to resign his leadership of the Liberal Party. At the time, male homosexual acts were illegal in Britain.
After the trial, Mr. Thorpe and his second wife, Marion — his first had died in a car crash — retired to their home in a remote Exmoor village and all but disappeared from public view.
But for a time he had been the Liberal Party’s most successful leader in decades, elected to the post in 1967 at the age of 38. In his nine-year tenure, until 1976, the party, now known as the Liberal Democrats, more than doubled its voter support, offering Britons a credible alternative to the Labour and Conservative parties.
Mr. Thorpe had become its face and voice, pressing for liberal policies at home and, as a human-rights advocate, for the abolition of apartheid in South Africa.
He was known for his oratorical eloquence and barbed wit. In 1962, after Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dismissed seven cabinet ministers in what became known as “the Night of the Long Knives,” Mr. Thorpe put an acerbic twist on biblical verse, remarking, “Greater love than this hath no man, than to lay down his friends for his life.”
He had also cut a suave, dashing figure, resplendent in bespoke Edwardian suits, thick gold watch chains and his signature trilby, a narrow-brimmed hat that he wore at a rakish angle over darkly saturnine features.
On Thursday, Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, praised Mr. Thorpe for his “leadership and resolve,” adding that “his involvement with the antiapartheid movement and the campaign for Britain’s membership of the Common Market were ahead of his time.”
Rumors of Mr. Thorpe’s sexual inclinations had circulated in political and journalistic circles for years without doing him any harm. But this changed in 1971, when the Liberal Party began an internal inquiry in response to allegations by Mr. Scott.
He said that in the early 1960s, when he was a stable hand, he had met Mr. Thorpe and begun a two-year sexual relationship with him in violation of anti-sodomy laws then on the books. (Homosexual acts between two men in private were decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967.) The inquiry exonerated Mr. Thorpe.
But Mr. Scott continued to press his accusations, selling letters to newspapers that he said Mr. Thorpe had written to him. In one, addressing Mr. Scott by a pet name, “Bunnies,” he promised to pay for a horse-riding course in France. It ended, “Bunnies can (and will) go to France.” (The quotation soon appeared on T-shirts around London.)
In 1975, an airline pilot, Andrew Newton, was accused of ambushing Mr. Scott on Exmoor, shooting Mr. Scott’s Great Dane with a handgun and turning it on Mr. Scott, saying it was his turn to die. The gun was not fired; Mr. Scott suggested that it had jammed. Mr. Newton was convicted of firearms violations.
It was during the trial that Mr. Scott accused Mr. Thorpe and his allies of hiring Mr. Newton. At the trial, during which Mr. Thorpe did not testify, a defense lawyer acknowledged that Mr. Thorpe had “homosexual tendencies” but denied the charges and said that Mr. Thorpe had never had a sexual relationship with Mr. Scott.
Mr. Thorpe’s defense proceeded to undermine the credibility of the three main prosecution witnesses, showing that they had lied or changed their stories and that some had lucrative newspaper contracts that would pay them even more if Mr. Thorpe was convicted.
In a remarkably critical summing up, the presiding judge, Sir Joseph Donaldson Cantley, called Mr. Scott a “liar,” a “fraud,” a “sponger” and a “crook.”
But although Mr. Thorpe was acquitted, the verdict left many questions unanswered. At the end of the trial, defense lawyers admitted that one of the defendants would have pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of conspiring to frighten Mr. Scott.
John Jeremy Thorpe was born in Surrey on April 29, 1929, the son of John Henry Thorpe and a maternal grandson of John Norton Griffiths, both of whom had been Conservative members of Parliament. An ancestor had been speaker of the House of Commons in the 1400s.
Jeremy Thorpe was educated at Eton and Oxford, where he studied law and was a talented debater. He was practicing law in London when he first won the North Devon seat, in 1959. He became Liberal Party leader in 1967. The next year he married the former Caroline Allpass, an art expert. Rupert is their son.
Mr. Thorpe’s leadership began inauspiciously. The Liberals did badly in the 1970 election, losing half of their seats and winning only 7.5 percent of the vote.
A week later his wife was killed in a car crash. And he was embarrassed when a financial scandal engulfed a banking house of which he was a nonexecutive director.
In 1973 Mr. Thorpe married Marion Stein, the former wife of the Earl of Harewood, who was a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II.
The Liberals made a dramatic electoral comeback in 1974, winning 14 seats with almost 20 percent of the national vote. For the first time since World War II, the party looked to be a credible third force in British politics, depriving both the Conservatives and Labour of an overall majority.
In a bid to retain power, Prime Minister Edward Heath, a Conservative, suggested a coalition with the Liberals. But the idea stalled. When a second election brought Labour to power later in 1974 under Harold Wilson, the Liberals did slightly less well, losing one seat and winning 5.3 million votes, or 18.3 percent.
Besides his son, Rupert, he is survived by grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His wife, Marion, died in March.
His trial was chronicled in two books — “The Last Word: An Eye-Witness Account of the Thorpe Trial” (1980), by Auberon Waugh, and “Jeremy Thorpe: A Secret Life” (1979), by Lewis Chester, Magnus Linklater and David May — and both implicitly questioned the verdict.
In 1999 Mr. Thorpe published his memoirs, “In My Own Time: Reminiscences of a Liberal Leader.” But the book did not shed any further light on the Scott episode.
In 2008, however, well after homosexuality had gained wide acceptance in British society, he reflected on the episode in an interview with The Guardian.
“If it happened now,” he told the newspaper, “the public would be kinder. Back then they were very troubled by it.”
He added, “It offended their set of values.”
