In an obituary published in The Daily Telegraph on 17 February, Alistair Lexden looked back at the career of Richard Thorpe, the superb biographer of three Conservative prime ministers. In accordance with custom, the obituary appeared without attribution to its writer.
Richard Thorpe, the historian D R Thorpe, who has died aged 79, was one of the finest political biographers of his generation.
He brought the meticulous, critical eye of the scholar to bear on an immense range of private political papers, including many which had not been consulted before. And he wrote up the results of his researches with great literary skill, winning the admiration of professional historians and a wide general readership.
He will be remembered in particular for his “prime ministerial triptych” as he liked to refer to his lives of Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and Alec Douglas-Home, the men who led successive Conservative governments following Churchill’s retirement in 1955.
Over a period of 35 years Thorpe interviewed all the major politicians and senior civil servants connected with them.
Working at the Hirsel in the Scottish borders on his life of Douglas-Home, which was published in 1996, he had the inestimable advantage of having, as he put it, “ the papers of his biographical subject at one end of the house and the subject himself at the other, ready to go over the details of the day’s researches.”
His most striking achievement was perhaps his reappraisal of Eden, published in 2003 and described by Roy Hattersley as “a biography of almost unqualified excellence.” Having studied the medical records, Thorpe showed that Eden was not a human wreck dependent on drugs during the Suez crisis, but an ill-starred patriot, dominant in the House of Commons, who was brought to disaster by American betrayal.
Thorpe reserved his deepest insights, however, for Supermac: The life of Harold Macmillan (2010) in which he explored the complex personality of this political wizard who knew how to handle “a national mood of self-deception, the belief that Britain remained a major world force.” Sir Vernon Bogdanor hailed it as “the best biography of a post-war British prime minister yet written.” It was Thorpe’s masterpiece.
David Richard Thorpe—Richard to his numerous friends—was born on March 12 1943, the only child of Cyril Thorpe, a Yorkshire accountant, and Mary, nee Avison, who was at school with Harold Wilson. Scotland became Richard’s adopted home after his mother’s remarriage, his father having died in 1946 at the very end of his war-time service in the Royal Navy.
At Fettes College in Edinburgh between 1956 and 1961, Richard became a lifelong protégé of the great headmaster, Eric Anderson, from whose advice Tony Blair would later profit. Anderson instilled in him a deep love of English literature, which he read at Selwyn College, Cambridge.
After graduating in 1965, Thorpe taught briefly at Gordonstoun, where he directed the future monarch, then Prince Charles, in a production of Shakespeare’s Henry V. He himself was an accomplished actor.
Thorpe displayed all the attributes of that now almost extinct breed, the bachelor public-school master, much given to telling anecdotes, with a life which revolved around the staff common room, during a teaching career of more than 30 years at Charterhouse. A passionate footballer, he scored more than a hundred goals for his common room team. No less devoted to golf, he was acclaimed for playing a difficult winning shot in a memorable match against the Old Carthusians. Opera was another great passion. Hearing that he was about to see Lulu, his headmaster, who knew nothing of Alban Berg’s work, kept saying“ I’m so glad”, believing that a girlfriend was at last in prospect.
In 1997 Thorpe became a full-time writer, assisted by research appointments at St Antony’s College, Oxford and Churchill College, Cambridge. Among his other publications was Selwyn Lloyd (1989), a life of the long-serving Tory minister. Lord Carrington declared himself amazed that such a dull man could have inspired such a fascinating book.
Thorpe’s final work was not received with universal praise. He was delighted to be asked to edit the journals of Kenneth Rose, author of the Albany column in The Sunday Telegraph, insisting they contained “gold dust”. But in the extracts which he published in two volumes in 2018 and 2019, revelations about high politics were greatly outnumbered by snippets of royal trivia. “There is gush galore,” a critic commented, “an undue amount of it poured over the Queen Mother.”
Thorpe’s rather slapdash editing probably betrayed the first signs of the dementia which confined him to a care home in 2021, the year he was appointed MBE, far less than his due, for services to political biography.
Thorpe, himself a diarist and a most genial individual , on one occasion interviewed the Queen Mother. After recalling her appearance with her husband George VI on the balcony of Buckingham Palace alongside Neville Chamberlain after the Munich agreement in 1938, she added: “You will have noted that my daughter did not follow the same course when Mr Heath returned after signing the Treaty of Accession to the European Communities in 1972.”
Richard Thorpe, born March 12 1943, died February 2 2023
