Jeremy Thorpe, who has died at the age of 85, became the principal forgotten figure of modern British politics long ago. Even classic tragedy on the Oscar Wilde scale eluded him. The grubby circumstances of the scandal arising from the shooting of a dog called Rinka on Exmoor brought his political career to an end. It was scarcely the stuff of which great human dramas are made. His fall, however, could hardly have been more total. Although acquitted of incitement and conspiracy to murder at the Old Bailey in June 1979, Thorpe by the time of his trial had already lost his seat in parliament and been forced to relinquish the leadership of the Liberal party.
Thereafter, it suited his colleagues and successors to airbrush his role out of the party’s history – a job they performed so successfully that the sole public re
minder of what had once been his national fame became his occasional and increasingly frail appearances at the grander sort of London memorial service.