The Sunday Times Magazine • 31
N
orman Scott still has nightmares about the
moment a hitman tried to blow his brains
out. He can feel the cold metal of a gun
barrel at his forehead; he can hear the
sound of the trigger clicking as the weapon
failed to fire.
“I can hear that noise in my hair, him
trying to make it work,” he says. “It was
absolutely terrifying. I still do have
nightmares about it. I’ve got a lovely life
now but it suddenly does happen and it’s
very frightening.” Moments of everyday life
have a terrifying resonance. “I can jump out
of my skin at the weirdest things.”
In his early twenties he had become the
sometime lover of Jeremy Thorpe, the
charismatic leader of the Liberal Party,
11 years his senior, who Scott claims raped
him, manipulated him and then urged
associates to get rid of him. For more than
a decade they continued an on-off affair of
mutual and self-destruction, until Scott’s
demands for Thorpe to acknowledge him
collided with Thorpe’s vaunting ambition
and the need to protect himself at a time
when homosexuality was still illegal or,
after its decriminalisation in 1967, fatal to
a political career.
In October 1975, it was later alleged,
Andrew “Gino” Newton, a pilot known as
“chicken brain” to his friends, was recruited
as a hitman during a drinking binge in a
Blackpool nightclub. After first confusing
Barnstaple with Dunstable, he lured Scott
to a meeting on Exmoor, claiming he was
trying to protect Scott from another killer.
Fearing for his safety, Scott took his Great
Dane, Rinka, along with him. Newton shot
the dog, then allegedly turned the gun on
Scott — but it jammed. “The dog shouldn’t
have been there,” Scott remembers now.
“Had the dog not been there, that bullet
would have killed me.”
In the court case that followed in 1979
Scott was dismissed as a liar and Thorpe
was acquitted of conspiracy and incitement
to murder after one of the most disgraceful
summings-up in English judicial history,
where the judge issued an outspoken
character assassination to the principal
witness from the bench.
At that point, to the public, Scott was
someone whose claims were so outlandish
that they must be suspect. In a television
dramatisation of the story made in 2018,
A Very English Scandal, he was portrayed
as a weak and comedic figure, even if the
series did accept a lot of his version of
events. That bleak moment on Exmoor was
played for laughs, as a comedy of errors and
incompetence by Newton.
Now, though, Scott has written a book,
An Accidental Icon, that makes painfully
clear that his story is one of tragedy as much
as farce. In this version the Thorpe affair is a
tale of a sexual predator targeting a
Below: Ben Wishaw as
Norman Scott and Hugh
Grant as Jeremy Thorpe in
A Very English Scandal.
Bottom: Scott arriving at
court for Thorpe’s trial in 1979
PREVIOUS PAGES: GARETH IWAN JONES FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, ALPHA PRESS, BBC ➤
