The Sunday Times Magazine • 33young man, who was already vulnerable
as a result of abuse at home. It is then the
story of an establishment circling the
wagons to protect one of its own.
Policemen suppressed evidence that could
have incriminated Thorpe. Politicians and
judges routinely disbelieved Scott and
loaded the dice for the MP.
Scott is a character of far greater
complexity than his public image. He first
met Thorpe in 1961. Thorpe’s trial was in- In 1969 Scott married a woman with
whom he had the first of his two children.
When Stephen Frears, the director of
A Very English Scandal, visited Scott at his
home in Dorset to listen to his life story,
he concluded: “We’ve got the wrong bloody
film. There are four more films about
Norman in this.”
Scott recounts this with pride, perched
on a sofa in the cosy sitting room of his grade
I listed farm cottage with dogs and rare
breeds of poultry running together in the
yard outside. A tack room is adorned with
saddles and reins, and the rosettes he has
won as a horseman, the occupation he kept
returning to throughout a turbulent life.
When Ben Wishaw won an Emmy for his
portrayal of Scott in A Very English Scandal,
he said: “[He] took on the establishment
with courage and defiance that I find
completely inspiring. He is a true queer
hero and icon.” In the book Scott says he
“loved” Wishaw’s performance, but he tells
me: “He was made to be a very gay Norman.
I’ve never minced in my life. I’m not that
sort of guy.” Still, Scott liked the way
Wishaw humanised him for the public.
“The series was a cathartic thing. It did
change people’s attitudes. They saw me as a
stronger person. I am a very strong person.”
H
is dearest wish is that his account
of the scandal finally be believed.
Even before I turn on my voice
recorder, he looks me in the eye
and says: “This is not ‘my truth’,
it is ‘the truth’.” Twenty minutes
later he returns to the point:
“I do tell the truth, I always have.
That is what was so awful,
continually being called a liar. It’s
so wonderful that now it has been proven to
be true.” Much of it has. No one seriously
doubts the affair or the assassination plot.
If Scott has arranged the rest of it into a
convenient narrative, that is what victims
often do around traumatic events.
There is still an air of innocence about
Scott, a slight vulnerability that was all too
often exploited by others. The first to do so
was his mother. Widowed before he was
born, Ena Josiffe (the surname of her
second husband, a violent man) never told
Norman who his father was. He was “never
close” to his elder siblings and writes that
he “always felt like an outsider in my
family”. He was “four or five” when she
began to sexually assault him.Thorpe invited him to parliament. By
then Scott was dosed up on primitive
antidepressants. “I was still very heavily on
medication, very old-fashioned drugs like
librium. I was swept along by him.”
In their first sexual encounter, Scott has
always said, Thorpe raped him with the
MP’s mother in the room next door, calling
him “bunny” because he looked like a
“frightened bunny”. “I was full of drugs
when he first raped me,” Scott says.
“I couldn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t tell
anyone.” Thorpe, Scott says, promised he
would recover the national insurance card
or get Scott a new one. He never did. As
a catalyst for the scandal, this has always
seemed strange. “It’s only strange to you
because you’re younger,” Scott says. “It was
really important. You had to have a card with
stamps on it stamped every week. He kept
saying he would frank them and never did.”
Scott has always seemed to me a
frustratingly fatalistic character in the key
years of his life, bound to train tracks he
could not see a way of escaping. “He had got
me.” Why didn’t he flee? “Where could I
have gone? I don’t think I could have taken
a different path. I was caught by him.” I find
it very difficult to understand why Scott
couldn’t have applied for a new card without
having to rope in Thorpe to help him, but
this is so ingrained in Scott’s world view
that, these days, questioning his damaged
mindset amounts to victim-blaming.
What did Thorpe get from it? Was it just
sex? “Yes, that was all it was. In those days
I was quite attractive.” Not perhaps even
that. In the book Scott says it was about
power and control for Thorpe, not lust or
desire. “He loved the fact that I was in his
thrall,” he says now. “It was cold and
dispassionate, but I didn’t know. I was the
age of a 15-year-old when I was 19, totally
unsure of people and life.” Thorpe,
I suggest, was a psychopath. “I do truly
think he was,” Scott says.
If it had ended there it would have been
just another sordid Westminster story of a
powerful man abusing his position with an
impressionable victim years his junior. This
stuff still goes on. Even in the week this
magazine went to press, the Wakefield MP,
Imran Ahmed Khan, was jailed for sexually
assaulting a 15-year-old boy in 2008. Politics
attracts ambitious narcissists and risk-takers
who are out for what they can get.
As the 1960s went on, Scott harassed
Thorpe for his national insurance card and
the book recounts how Thorpe began visiting
him weekly for sex, occasionally taking
him to his club, where he met luminaries
such as the BBC boss Lord Reith.“NEWTON CAME IN
AND WASHED HIS
HANDS. IT WAS
A HORROR. HE
LOOKED AT ME IN
THIS WEIRD WAY...
IT FRIGHTENED ME
SO MUCH”
In March 1976 Andrew Newton,
left, was sentenced to two years
in prison after killing Scott’s
dog. He later claimed to have
been hired to kill ScottALAMY ➤
He tells me: “It happened. I had to write
what I wrote because I think it made me the
person I am — not to a good degree. The
important thing was that when this thing
with Thorpe happened most people would
go home to their family and I couldn’t,
because I couldn’t go back to my mother.
That was the last thing I wanted to do.”
“This thing with Thorpe” started when
Scott was just 21, training to do three-day
eventing, and Thorpe visited the yard
where he worked. The Liberal MP for
North Devon and a rising star in
parliament, Thorpe was secretly having
a homosexual affair with the yard’s owner,
Brecht van der Vater. Thorpe offered Scott
help if he was ever in trouble. In 1961,
when van der Vater took his national
insurance card, apparently to keep him
beholden, Scott sought out Thorpe at the
House of Commons.