[A-List] UK state: Wilson plot

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Aside from the possibility that Joe Haines is worried about his pension
given the current travails of the stock market, it's not clear who has
anything to gain from this collection of barrel-scrapings from Robert
Maxwell's former champion-in-chief. Thorpe was leader of the Liberal party,
whose strong anti-apartheid stance attracted the attention of the South
African BOSS which, in partnership with elements of MI5 and other
freelancers like the McWhirter brothers, set about persecuting prominent
anti-apartheid activists including then-Young Liberal Peter Hain. As for
Wilson exploiting Thorpe's homosexuality, this allegation must be weighed
against Wilson's quite courageous public defence of Thorpe as the victim of
BOSS smears when the Scott case triggered Thorpe's downfall. At the time
this was portrayed as the bizarre ramblings of a paranoid "Walter Mitty" (to
use the Guardian's favourite designation, coined by Andrew Roth). However
given what we now know Wilson was trying to make sense of the undoubted
campaign being conducted against him, including repeated burglaries of his
and his staff's offices and residences. What has Haines to say of this?
Conveniently once again, just about every major player in this story is dead
or unable to comment (what can the Parkinson's disease-afflicted and utterly
discredited Thorpe say now?), while it's difficult to imagine any harm
coming Straw's way from this.


Straw 'was in 70s plot to out Thorpe'

Home secretary used position as special adviser to Barbara Castle to amass
data on Liberal leader's homosexual friend

Owen Bowcott
Monday October 7, 2002
The Guardian

Foreign secretary Jack Straw was involved in a government plot to smear
Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe by exposing him as homosexual, according
to the memoirs of a senior Downing Street aide.

The plan to discredit Mr Thorpe was allegedly devised by Harold Wilson when
Labour leader, to prevent the Liberals reaching a coalition agreement with
the Conservatives.

The genesis of the conspiracy - revealed in Glimmers of Twilight by Joe
Haines, who was Mr Wilson's press secretary - was the close result of the
February 1974 general election called by Edward Heath, from which Labour
emerged as the largest party but lacking an overall majority.

"We heard ... that Jeremy Thorpe was contemplating forming a coalition with
Heath in which, it was said, Thorpe would become home secretary," Mr Haines
recalled.

"We were sure that Liberal MPs wouldn't allow Thorpe to get away with it,
but Wilson was going to take no chances."

Convinced that Heath, now Sir Edward, would abandon any alliance if Thorpe
were outed as gay, Wilson proposed publicising details of the Liberal
leader's affair with a younger man, Norman Scott.

The immediate threat receded when Heath, as outgoing prime minister, went to
Buckingham Palace and resigned to make way for a Labour minority
administration.

As prime minister, Wilson's suspicious mind was fuelled by his political
secretary, Marcia Williams, later Lady Falkender, and he determined to build
a dossier for use against Thorpe should the need again arise.

"Wilson was not finished with Thorpe," Haines's account, serialised in the
Mail on Sunday, maintained.

"Subsequently he asked Barbara Castle, who became his secretary of state for
social security, to let him have details of Scott's national insurance
records for possible future use." Wilson knew that Scott's national
insurance cards had been held by Thorpe. "Mrs Castle was unhappy at [the]
request and Wilson told her "Get Jack Straw" to do it.

Mr Straw was at that time a special adviser to Mrs Castle; he later
inherited her Blackburn parliamentary seat. "Later I asked Wilson if he had
got what he wanted, and he said he had. But how Mrs Castle got the records,
or from whom, I never learned, " wrote Mr Haines.

At the weekend Mr Straw confirmed he had seen Scott's file and written a
report on it. A statement released through his lawyers, Bindman and
partners, said: "Harold Wilson asked Barbara Castle what was behind Norman
Scott's prosecution by the DHSS.

"Through her principal private secretary, Mrs Castle asked her second
permanent secretary, Sir Lance Errington (responsible for social security),
to get the file, which he duly did. Then the principal private secretary and
Mrs Castle's special adviser, Jack Straw, read the file and produced a
report summarising its content.

"The report was given to Mrs Castle, who in turn gave the report to Mr
Wilson, but not the file itself,which remained in the department. Mr Straw
had no direct contact with Mr Wilson about the matter."

Details of Mr Scott's social security records, officially confidential, did
eventually find their way into the press in 1974, establishing a link with
Thorpe. An internal civil service inquiry was later set up to discover the
source. Mr Straw has declined to elaborate on the inquiry.

· A Labour benefactor gave Harold Wilson a brown paper parcel containing up
to £8,000 in cash (worth £100,000 in today's prices), according to Haines's
account. Colonel John Brayley, a businessman, was later made a peer and
appointed army minister in the Lords.

"It was naive of Brayley to offer it, and foolish of Wilson to accept it,"
Haines observed. "Wilson didn't profit from it personally -he didn't have
much regard for wealth.

"Instead it was used to sustain his office staff, which is why for the next
year I was paid each month in £50 notes." Lord Brayley was forced to resign
after several months in his ministerial post.

"Wilson told me that [other ministers] said it was unfortunate Brayley
couldn't write his own speeches; even worse, he couldn't read those written
for him."

Lord Brayley died before he could be tried for allegedly taking money from
his own company.