The Green party’s women problem

In an excellent essay I wrote for this magazine at the start of the year – ‘Sir’ Ed Davey’s Lib Dems are the real nasty party’ – I touched on my adolescent crush on the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe:

‘I felt confusion watching Thorpe speak – he sounded so kind, yet looked so cruel – but dismissed this as a paradox of sex appeal, which he certainly had, having outraged his classmates at Eton by announcing that he planned to marry Princess Margaret, at that time second in line to the throne. It wasn’t until I read Jamaica Inn and shared Mary Yellan’s horror on discovering exactly how the vicar saw his flock that I was able to make sense of the strange situation. When all the awful stuff about Thorpe came out as my teenage years drew to a close, I felt I had learned quite a lesson about politicians who present as virtuous; give me an outright bounder any day.’

The incident from Jamaica Inn I referred to is when Mary finds a secret drawing the apparently kind and gentle preacher has done, portraying himself as a ravening wolf leading a congregation of duped sheep.