Former British Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe dies aged 85

Jeremy Thorpe, who brought the Liberal party to the brink of coalition government in 1974 but resigned amid scandal soon after, has died aged 85. He died on Thursday morning after a long battle with Parkinson's disease, his son Rupert has announced.

From the age of 38, he led the Liberals for nine years. Between 1967 and 1976, surviving a poor performance in the 1970 general election, he turned the Liberals from a tiny party of six MPs into a small one of 11. In the 1974 general election, Thorpe played up his relative youthfulness by vaulting a security barrier wearing his trademark trilby.

The Liberals made a breakthrough, winning 19 per cent of the vote (then a post-war record) and got 14 MPs. Although then prime minister Ted Heath had not won a majority, he had won the popular vote and refused to resign. Thorpe went to Downing Street for secret coalition talks with Heath (at one point being smuggled into No 10).

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Jeremy Thorpe. who died on Thursday, pictured in 1999. Photograph: PA

The talks eventually collapsed as the Liberals couldn't stomach coalition with the Tories and feared being tainted by Heath, whom even the conservative Spectator magazine was calling a "squatter" in No 10. It was the the closest to actual government the third party had ever come, with the failure of the talks leading to a minority Labour government led by Harold Wilson.

Two years after walking up Downing Street, Thorpe resigned as leader of the party after being accused of conspiracy to murder a former model, Norman Scott, who claimed to be a former lover. Scott had survived an incident in Devon in 1975 in which a gunman shot dead his great Dane, Rinka. The assailant then turned the gun on Scott but the weapon jammed. Thorpe was charged with conspiracy to murder but was acquitted on all charges in 1979. By then, however, he had by then had lost his seat and his party.

Not long after the end of the trial Thorpe was found to have Parkinson's disease and retired from public life. For many years, the disease has been at an advanced stage. However, in 1997 he visited the Liberal Democrat party conference and was given a standing ovation by party members, and he attended the funeral of Roy Jenkins in 2003.

In 1999, Thorpe published his memoirs, In My Own Time, in which he described key episodes in his political life. He did not, however, shed any further light on the Norman Scott affair. "If it happened now I think ... the public would be kinder. Back then they were very troubled by it," he told the Guardian in 2008. "It offended their set of values."

Harold Wilson thought the allegations a Conservative smear, asking in a memo to one of his ministers, Barbara Castle, why damaging details surfaced later in the 1970s at a time when Labour might want to go into coalition with the Liberals, rather than earlier when Heath had sought such an arrangement.

Thorpe said in 2008 that it was more likely to have been his opposition to apartheid that brought about the trouble: “South Africa certainly attempted to smear me. They made life very difficult. I wanted to clear the air, but I was pretty shattered. I would have gone on leading the Liberal Democrats. I think I could have pushed up our number of seats.”

Matthew Parris, Tory MP-turned-broadcaster, described the episode as the "most sensationalof [scandal] the parliamentary century, bar the Profumo scandal".

Thorpe’s father and maternal grandfather were Conservative MPs, but he became a Liberal because of international blunders by the Tories (he cited Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and later the party’s Suez “adventure”).

Thorpe was married to interior decorator Caroline Allpass. Their son Rupert was born in 1969. Caroline Thorpe was killed in a car crash in June 1970. Thorpe married Marion Stein in 1973. A distinguished concert pianist, she died in 2014.

The Liberal Democrats tweeted the news that the former Liberal leader had died, adding: “Our thoughts are with his family.”

Lord Steel of Aikwood, who succeeded him as party leader, said: "He had a genuine sympathy for the underprivileged – whether in his beloved North Devon where his first campaign was for 'mains, drains and a little bit of light' or in Africa, where he was a resolute fighter against apartheid and became a respected friend of people like President Kaunda of Zambia."

Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who attended Thorpe's 80th birthday party in 2008, paid tribute to the former Liberal leader. "Jeremy Thorpe's leadership and resolve were the driving force that continued the Liberal revival that began under Jo Grimond, " he said. "Jeremy oversaw some of the party's most famous by-election victories and his involvement with the anti-apartheid movement and the campaign for Britain's membership of the common market were ahead of his time.

“My thoughts are with Jeremy’s family and friends as they try and come to terms with their loss.”

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