Jeremy Thorpe after discovery by the "Daily Mail". Bessell gave muddled accounts of his involvement with Scott, but insisted that his former chief was innocent of any wrongdoing. On 16 March 1976 Newton's trial began at Exeter Crown Court, where Scott repeated his allegations against Thorpe despite the efforts of the prosecution's lawyers to silence him. Newton was found guilty and sentenced to two years' imprisonment, but did not incriminate Thorpe. The erosion of public support for the Liberal Party continued with several poor by-election results in March, which the former leader Grimond attributed to increasing lack of confidence in Thorpe. On
Jeremy Thorpe numerous friendships with his contemporaries, many of whom later achieved distinction. These were almost exclusively with men; even so, he was not identified as a member of any of Oxford's homosexual sets. He confided to a friend that politics provided him with the necessary level of emotional excitement, thus making sexual relationships unnecessary. Thus, Bloch suggests, he was accepted by his fellow-students as "a basically asexual character, wrapped up in politics and his career". Having been accepted as a potential Liberal parliamentary candidate, Thorpe looked for a constituency. The general elections of 1950 and 1951 had seen the party's MPs