A Very English Scandal: sex, lies and a murder plot at the heart of the Establishment
John Preston

The hugely entertaining account by John Preston of the Jeremy Thorpe affair is a strange tale of furtive liaisons, fraudulent deals, blackmail plots and conspiracy to murder, rendered more extra- ordinary by the the man at the centre being, for a while, leader of the Liberal Party.
It revolves around the personalities of three very different, very flawed men. Jeremy Thorpe was elected MP for North Devon in 1959. Charismatic, dashing, debonair, he was known to be “terrific fun” but also fond of risk. In an age when homosexuality was still a criminal offence Thorpe liked to walk on the wild side, and briefly fell in with Norman Scott (alias Josiffe), a teenage stable boy. Make that unstable boy: after a troubled childhood, Scott had been in and out of juvenile courts. Born Catholic, he would suffer periodic stabs of guilt about his delinquency, though it didn’t stop him pilfering a cache of compromising letters Thorpe had written to another man. Determined to break from Scott, Thorpe enlisted the help of a fellow Liberal MP named Peter Bessell, a fantasist, lothario and businessman of a dodginess notable even by Westminster standards. Thus was entrained a desultory 20-year intrigue that would culminate in a showdown at Court Number One of the Old Bailey in 1979.