Scott, unsurprisingly, was ‘touched’ by Whishaw’s words, and is now publishing a memoir, An Accidental Icon, cajoled from him by the team that produced Anne Glenconner’s best-selling Lady in Waiting.
His day has come. Where once, according to one source, you could sense people drawing away from Scott, he is now something of a national treasure, although he can still be difficult: ‘I’m loath to put any part of my anatomy near to that hornet’s nest again,’ said one who’s crossed swords with Scott. But his Dartmoor house is his for life, bought for him by sympathetic friends in 1985; in it is the multitude of Staffordshire china dogs he has bought over the years, and the throne-like chair given to him by Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West’s lover. It is a comfortable berth in which at length to find some sense of vindication.
After the Old Bailey trial, Scott believed, with some justification, that he had been the victim of an Establishment stitch-up; on the other hand, his tormentor, Thorpe, had suffered a fatal blow to his reputation. So Scott retired from public view, living quietly. Now the spotlight is on him once again. When Thorpe first saw the 19-year-old Scott, leaning over a stable door in Oxfordshire in 1960, he thought the tall, dark-haired youth was ‘simply heaven’. But those were different times. Male homosexuality was illegal; men could, and did, go to jail because of it. No MP was ‘out’; to admit to being a homosexual was to ruin one’s career. The then 31-year-old Thorpe was MP for North Devon and a rising star in his party; the dashing, extroverted Old Etonian was also, he told a colleague, 80 per cent gay and 20 per cent heterosexual; Scott was troubled, ‘fey’, confused as to his sexuality and working at a riding school for a faintly louche friend of Thorpe’s. Thorpe gave Scott his card, embossed with parliament’s crest; Scott should come and see him, he said, if his employer ever gave him any trouble.
