Jeremy Thorpe 1,166. After the 1966 election, Grimond confided to senior party officials that he wished soon to step down from the leadership. Thorpe was now the senior Liberal MP after Grimond, and the party's highest-profile member, although Timothy Beaumont, chairman of the party's organising committee, noted in his diary: "I am pretty certain that he has little popularity within the Parliamentary Party". When Grimond finally resigned, on 17 January 1967, an election to replace him was arranged to take place within 48 hours, leaving little time for manoeuvring. The 12 Liberal MPs formed the whole electorate; after the first ballot, Thorpe
Jeremy Thorpe from the safety of the bench. In a BBC investigative documentary broadcast in December 2014, an antique firearms collector named Dennis Meighan claimed that he had been hired by an unidentified senior Liberal to kill Scott, for a fee of £13,500. Instead, he had passed the job on to his associate, Newton, and provided him with the gun. After confessing to the police, Meighan was asked to sign a prepared statement which, according to him, "left everything out that was incriminating, but at the same time everything I said about the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe, et cetera, was left out