Alan Hollinghurst on Jeremy Thorpe and "A Very English Scandal"

Here. Hollinghurst is of course playing at his home ground on this topic, but he plays a good innings. 

There is something very odd about how larky the whole thing is, and how ready we are to be sympathetic to Thorpe despite the fact that he had so little going for him. It is all very English and about class and charm and so on - yes, yes, of course. But Thorpe does seem to have hired a hitman. Surely that's, well, just a little bit off? 

I think Auberon Waugh gets to the bottom of the matter with one of his jokes: "[the gun] jammed, and Newton panicked and drove off. This was the moment that, in Auberon Waugh’s words, “lifted the Scott affair from being of minority, largely satirical interest, to being a matter of genuine public concern.”" The fact is that Scott was not killed - indeed he has survived Thorpe. The jamming of that gun is just so implausible - it would be so groan-inducing if the story were fiction - that it somehow invites us to treat the whole thing as a cosmic joke. (That plus the Barnstaple/Dunstable thing.) But it's not really that funny, is it?