Jeremy Thorpe scandal: Who's still alive and where are they now?

As the BBC’s critically fêted A Very English Scandaldrew to a close last night, viewers of the three-part drama likely came away with a few questions.

“How many Baftas are we allowed to award one show?” was the gist of most Twitter responses on Sunday evening. “Why on earth has Hugh Grant not been given a part like this before?” was another, and arguably demands a judge-led inquiry, if not some serious soul-searching among casting directors.

But above all, for any generation of viewer – be it those of us with a distinct memory of the story breaking and those of us barely able to believe it really happened – the most likely question was this: hang on, if this all only happened 40-odd years ago, aren’t some of them alive now?

Most people quite definitely aren’t, of course. Jeremy Thorpe died in 2014, aged 85, after a long battle with Parkinson’s. His wife, Marion, died nine months earlier. Peter Bessell, Thorpe’s confidant and right-hand man, died from emphysema aged in 1985, and Jason Watkins’s character, Lord Hooson, died six years ago.

There are three key figures in the scandal who are still with us, however. Here, we trace what became of them.

Norman Scott

Played exquisitely by Ben Whishaw in A Very English Scandal, Norman Scott (born Norman Josiffe) is a former stable boy and model, who allegedly began a homosexual relationship with Jeremy Thorpe in 1961. Gay sex was illegal at the time, and after falling out with Thorpe, Scott tried began to involve others in his story. It’s claimed that Thorpe then tried to have him killed, but after his assassination was botched, Scott ran away.

After the affair, Scott married Sue Myers, with whom he had a son, Benjamin. By 1979, when the scandal was brought before a jury, Scott returned as a key prosecution witness at Thorpe’s attempted murder trial. He then spent decades living in relative obscurity in a “Grade I-listed medieval Dartmoor longhouse”, where he remains. Now in his 70s, he has reportedly spent the past 20 years in a relationship with an artist.

Andrew Newton

For a while, the man who claimed he was paid only frighten Scott, pilot Andrew Newton (played by the Inbetweeners’ Blake Harrison in the programme) was thought to be dead. Gwent Police believed it as recently as last year, in fact, when a fresh investigation was launched.

This week, however, the Mail on Sunday claimed to have tracked down Andrew Newton in Surrey, and found him very much alive, living under the alias Hann Redwin. As viewers prepared to watch yesterday’s episode, police travelled to Dorking in order to find the 71-year-old failed assassin.

The Observer then Googled his name and found a 1994 article about a coroner ruling out foul play after a woman named Caroline Mayorcas fell to her death in Switzerland while climbing with her partner… Hann Redwin. The subsequent inquest uncovered that Redwin was Newton, and lived in Chiswick, south west London. Watch this space.

Dennis Meighan

Once a ‘tough guy’ of London, four years ago Dennis Meighan – who didn’t appear in A Very English Scandal – claimed he was contacted in 1975 by his former school friend, Newton, who asked if he could give him a gun.

He then alleges they met in Shepherd’s Bush, along with a representative of Thorpe, where he was offered £13,500 (around £140,000 in today’s money) to kill Scott. Meighan agreed, heading to the intended murder site in Barnstaple, but says he lost his nerve and returned to London.

Decades later, Meighan claimed his role was covered up by the British Establishment. He says he was visited by policemen in October of 1975 and asked to sign a statement which had no mention of Thorpe’s name. Meighan, now 71, became an antique firearms collector.

George Deakin

The only one of Thorpe’s co-defendants that’s still alive is the former fruit machine salesman George Deakin. He told the jury he’d been asked to find someone to “frighten a blackmailer”, and found Andrew Newton. He denied any knowledge of a “murder” or that he briefed Newton. He is married, 77, and lives in Port Talbot, South Wales.