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At one stage he declared of his relationship with Thorpe: "By the end of 1962 I was very unhappy. I just wanted to finish the whole thing myself, Thorpe and everything. I just wanted to kill Thorpe." The judge described Scott as "a crook, a fraud, a sponger and a parasite."
Another prosecution witness was Peter Bessell, who claimed that Thorpe had confessed his homosexuality to him at a meeting in the House of Commons dining room and later said he wanted to murder Scott for blackmailing him. Bessell, the judge noted, was "a lay preacher who at the same time was sexually promiscuous and, therefore, a humbug."
As for Newton, Cantley described him as "that awful man" and a "conceited bungler" who "might have been inspired to take a little more care" if he had, in fact, been intent on murder.
"Whether it was a conspiracy to frighten or a conspiracy to kill, it was badly botched," he said. The judge also made the point that the testimony of the three principal prosecution witnesses was "tainted" by the huge sums of money that each had received for telling his story to the British press. Bessell admitted on the stand that his contract for serialization of portions of a book he is writing called for twice as much ($100,000) if Thorpe were convicted. By the judge's reckoning, Scott was paid $31,000 by newspaper and television companies, and Newton $22,000.
From the beginning, Thorpe had insisted that he was innocent both of the criminal charges and of any sexual relationship with Scott. In a written statement at the end of the trial, Thorpe called the verdict "totally fair, just and a complete vindication." Then he embraced his wife, a former concert pianist, and his mother, both of whom had attended the trial, and climbed into his old black Humber. He said he intended to take a short rest with his family, away from the glare of publicity.
Few believed that Thorpe would ever again be able to pick up the pieces of what had been a distinguished, indeed brilliant, public life.
During his 20 years in the House of Commons he had revived Britain's once great Liberal Party as a potent force in British politics. As a product of Eton and Oxford, and the husband of the former Countess of Harewood, he was an important member of that peculiarly British Institution, The Establishment, an exclusive "old boy" network that is still one of the keys to power and influence in Great Britain.
In London's fashionable West End, he dazzled Mayfair dinner parties with imitations of leading politicians that wounded with the precision of a fine steel rapier. His public manner lent a youthful zest to politics that the British public openly admired. Thorpe's fall from grace, therefore, was all the more dramatic. In surprisingly sympathetic words, the prosecuting counsel, Peter Taylor, noted: "The tragedy of this case ... is that Mr. Thorpe has been surrounded and in the end his career blighted by the Scott affair. His story is a tragedy of truly Greek or Shakespearean proportions—the slow but inevitable destruction of a man by the stamp of one defect." -