Another voice
A wicked thing
Auberon Waugh
MR SCOTT: I pretended I was the son of the Earl of Eldon.
MR CARMAN QC:: Do you think that was a wicked thing?
MR SCOTT: Yes I do, but I have done so many wicked things in the past.
Poor old Jack Eldon. As it happens, I knew him well. Many is the silver threepenny bit I truffied out of a plate of flour with my nose at his home in years gone by. His children's parties were the bright spot of West Country social life during the war and for some years after his lemonade was among the best in the Tiverton district. I don't think that anyone who knew Jack Eldon would be taken in by Norman's pretence. Jack Eldon kept all his guns in a glass-fronted cupboard, strangely enough in his drawing room at Rackenford. Among them was a double-barrelled elephant gun which I coveted throughout my childhood. In those days it seemed a perfectly normal and appropriate thing that if one met an elephant in the course of one's daily business one would wish to shoot it. It never occurred to me that it might be rather embarrassing to be left with this enormous corpse. Nor did it seem to have occurred to Jack Eldon.
Norman isn't like that at all, if I read him aright. He cares deeply about animals. He may go down in history, if for nothing else, as the man who tried to give the kiss of life to a dead Great Dane on the top of Porlock Hill. But if it was a wicked thing for Norman to pretend to be the son of the Earl of Eldon, his was at least an old-fashioned sort of wickedness. Much of Norman's wickedness seems to belong to an earlier age: advertising himself in Country Life as an ex-public schoolboy; adding a second barrel to his name to become Lianch-Josiffe, then the Honourable Norman Lianch-Josiffe; then changing his name to Scott so that he could be more like Lord Eldon.
It was of the first Lord Eldon, the ferocious Lord Chancellor, that Shelley wrote: Next came Fraud, and he had on Like Eldon, an ermined gown; His big tears, for he wept well Turned to millstones as they fell.
And the little children who Round his feet played to and fro Thinking every tear a gem Had their brains knocked out by them.
(Mask of Anarchy 4-5) Not the earldom all of us would choose, perhaps, given the pick of the English nobility, but it was good enough for Norman. The other Norman in the case (not counting Sir Norman Skelhorn, the former DPP, a third friend of Mr Thorpe's with this unusual name who has been mentioned) has given no clue to the origin of his courtesy title -one searches Burke's Family Index for the Honourable Norman Van de Breck de Vater in vain. All we know about him, really, from a statement of 1976, is that at one time Mr Thorpe held him in 'high esteem'.
The Normans would appear to belong to a recognisable tradition, with elements of Boys Own Paper, Lord Snooty and his pals and John Buchan. Mr Andrew Gino Newton's image would appear to be more modern. Somehow he must reconcile an image of himself as 'professional! 'it man' with another image of the typical modern citizen of modern Britain, product of modern schooling with audiovisual aids, reader of the Sunday Times 'Look!' pages and follower of graphics and diagrams, a voice of the New Age, flippant, cynical, selfrighteous, stupid, most at home in some modern hotel with its own swimming pool, every bed-room equipped with self-service meals in do-it-yourself infra-red ovens. Indeed one sometimes feels he might have been spawned in some such establishment, product of a chance encounter between a lonely guest and his infra-red instant meal machine. He speaks in the ghastly comprehensive school English of the New Britain, explaining how, after his change of heart in respect of 'what was intended, er, with regard to Mr Scott', he planned to 'manipulate the situation and hopefullY defuse it'. His way of hopefully defusing the situation, ultimately, was to pretend his gun had jammed, he explained.
In the tradition of New Britain, Mr Newton struck me as being as at home in the role of prosecution witness as he was as a professional hit man. But one must not complain. His evidence was highly enjoyable, and for those who can get over their sorrow for everyone involved — wives, mothers, children, brothers, sisters and aunts— the whole trial has been a long Christmas Party. We have heard evidence from the Ghost of Christmas Past, Mr Norman Scott, and frorn the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Mr Andrew Newton. The great question hanging over the trial as it enters its fourth week of prosecution evidence is whether we shall hear from the Ghost of Christmas Present, Mr Jeremy Thorpe, as a defence witness. , Perhaps, in promising a 'vigorous defence, he was referring merely to the efforts of Mr George Carman and Sir David Napley. This might be a good moment to praise the defence team. Mr Carman s handling of the Crown witnesses to date has struck me as masterly, while the team led bY Sir David Napley (whose knight hood hung over the Minehead proceedings like the plumed helmet over the Castle of Otranto) has plainly turned up evidence which evaded all the teams of hacks from four newspapers who have been touring the country for two and a half years, waving their cheque books above their heads. Among the rewards of this spadework was the discovery that Scott had been boasting of a homosexual relationship with Thorpe before the alleged events of November 1961.
No doubt the prosecution effort has been equally meticulous — Mr Taylor has the dignity, the rectitude, the noble intelligence of the very best sort of Roman Senator— bat, there are some areas over which a sort 01 gentlemanly reticence seems to prevail. At one point in his cross-examination, Scott referred to some alleged letters fr°11I Thorpe to Norman Vater, and was shut 1:113. by the judge — 'That was just a bit of dr' thrown in. Listen to the question and answer and behave yourself.' It is undoubtedlY true that Scott wps wandering from the, point. When Mr Taylor raised these allege') letters in re-examination he was again pre" vented from doing so by the judge. Mr Carman may have been referring to these,s alleged letters when he said to Scott: clear up any mystery about this. You kill when you went to the House of Comniriti, [in 19611 that Mr Thorpe at the time ha"; homosexual tendencies, didn't you?' That I all we have heard.
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