36 • The Sunday Times Magazine
a spineless neurotic character ... a fraud ...
a sponger ... a whiner ... a parasite”. Cook
had him telling the jury to “retire to consider
your verdict of not guilty”. Scott says Cook
spoke to him before the monologue. “It was
great but I didn’t like ‘the player of the pink
oboe’,” a euphemism that, in comedy lore,
was given to Cook by Billy Connolly.
Recalling the real case and the judge’s
remarks, Scott says: “When I came out
I said to the reporters, ‘If that silly old man,
looking like a spaniel with his wig, were to
come out here and say that, I would have
him straight back in there for libel.’ He did
libel me. It was appalling, the things he said
about me. I think he was totally antigay, but
I think there was more to it than that.”
He has nothing good to say, either, for
Peter Taylor, the lead prosecutor, who did
not ask the most basic questions or seek out
evidence that would have undermined
Thorpe’s lies that he was not gay. “The
reason being that he knew he was in line
to be lord chief justice,” Scott claims. “He
never spoke to me. He never came to see
me once.” Taylor was made lord chief
justice in 1992. He died in 1997.
During the Thorpe trial Scott once again
came face to face with Newton, the alleged
hitman, in the lavatories at the court. “He
came in and washed his hands. It was a
horror. He looked at me in this weird way.
I went into a cubicle and cried my eyes out.”
All this has left Scott with a deep distaste
for the establishment: “All lying and looking
after their own and looking after him.
I don’t have anything to do with authority.
I live here very quietly.”
And the cover-up, if such it is, continued
until recently. In 2014 Meighan went
public to say he had also been hired to kill
Scott. In 2016 Gwent police were called in
to investigate the alleged cover-up. A year
later their probe was closed and they
pronounced that Newton was dead. Scott
says he found him alive, living under a new
name, with a little simple googling. In 2018
the police admitted Newton was alive but
still said there would be no further action.
Scott has nothing printable, given the
libel laws, to say for David Steel, who
eventually replaced Thorpe as leader of the
Liberals. Steel has always denied that he
had any idea Thorpe was either gay or
plotted to kill Scott. (Later he used a 2018
Newsnight interview to call the revelations
that Cyril Smith was a serial abuser of boys
“scurrilous hearsay”.)
“I think the moment you walk through
the door of parliament and up into St
Stephen’s Hall you become corrupt,” Scott
says. He doesn’t like Boris Johnson.
“Nothing has changed at all since that time.
Everyone lies.”
Early in the interview Scott says to me:
“I hope we’re not just going to talk aboutAlthough described in the press
as a “stable boy”, Scott, pictured
with his horse, Slipper, in 1979,
was training to be a three-day
event rider when he met Thorpe ALAMY