In 1979, the former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, along with three others, was accused of conspiring to murder his former lover Norman Scott also known as Norman Josiffe.

Jeremy Thorpe was an energetic, liberal politician. He was charming, charismatic and witty, confident and ambitious. He was popular. But behind the surface there was another Jeremy Thorpe, quite different from the well-known respected public figure. Thorpe was a homosexual.

Homosexuality was a criminal offence in the United Kingdom until 1967 when the Sexual Offences Bill, supported by the then Home Secretary Labour Roy Jenkins, decriminalised homosexual acts between two men over 21 years of age.Although the truth about his sexuality would have instantly ended his political career, Thorpe was taken enormous risks. He had many relationships with men but most of them were short and clandestine. In the summer of 1961, Thorpe met the 19 years old Norman Josiffe (he later changed his name to Norman Scott). Though the relationship was relatively brief, it was the one that almost two decades later would destroy Thorpe’s political career and will create the biggest scandal in twentieth century British politics.

The unlawfulness of homosexuality made Norman Scott a threat, when Thorpe became a leader of the Liberal Party in 1967. At that time the affair was over, but old letters from Thorpe to Scott were still hanging around, in missing suitcases somewhere in Austria, and hidden in a safe in the offices of Security Service.

To keep Scott and his affair with him away from the public eye, Thorpe began to contemplate extreme measures. Scott had to be vanished from the face of the earth. With the help of an old friend, Thorpe hired in 1975, an unprofessional hitman, called Andrew Newton, to kill Scott. The whole thing would be laughable were it not so terrifying for Norman Scott. Newton only succeeded in shooting Scott’s dog, an enormous dane called Rinka. At his trial, he admitted shooting the dog, but he claimed, falsely, that he’d never intended to kill his Scott, just to frighten him because Norman Scott had blackmailed him.

It was just a matter of time for the whole affair to become public. Thorpe was forced to resign as leader of the Liberals in 1976. He subsequently lost his seat in the 1979 General Election. It ended with Thorpe put on trial for conspiracy to murder and he went on trial at the Old Bailey, also in 1979. The prosecutor called the whole story a tragedy of Greek or Shakespearean proportions. The Judge Joseph Cantley, in an astonishing sum up speech which left the jury in no doubt where his sympathies lay, had characterized the trial as "bizarre and surprising." Norman Scott, he said, was a crook and a parasite, Jeremy Thorpe in contrast, was a distinguished national figure. Thorpe and his three fellow defendants were acquitted. Yet rumors were already rife among politicians and journalists; Thorpe’s political career come to a humiliated end. We had to wait 40 years for the truth to comes to light.

An engaging and grim story of scandals, lies and betrayal, lives destroyed by dirty politics and homophobic culture, a real example of judicial misconduct or how the establishment take care of itself.

Jeremy Thorpe was a rising star of politics, elected leader of the Liberal Party at a young age he felt that his minority party would hold sway between the two major powers in a coalition and that he would wield power. However Thorpe had one big secret, he was a homosexual and in the 1960s homosexuality was still a criminal offence. When Thorpe came into contact with a young man called Norman Joliffe the seeds were sown for his downfall. Nearly twenty years later Thorpe was on trial for conspiracy to murder Norman Scott (as Joliffe was known).

This book has the great advantage of telling a sad and unpleasant story but in an extremely readable style which makes it seem more like a fictional account. Thorpe does not come out of this well but it is fascinating to think of the charisma that he must have had, inspiring loyalty in colleagues and friends, even as his 'crimes' escalated. One feels very sorry for the friends that he betrayed but also angered at the callousness Thorpe showed and that idea of entitlement that meant he was above the law. There is a bit of conjecture about a conspiracy theory amongst the upper echelons of political and legal society which meant that Thorpe was acquitted at trial. However this does seem to be a relatively balanced reporting of known facts even if those facts read more like fiction.

This book is subtitled ‘Sex, Lies and a Murder Plot at the Heart of the Establishment’. It deals with events leading up to, during and after the trial of Jeremy Thorpe, leader of the Liberal party, on a charge of conspiracy to murder Norman Scott. I was very disappointed in it at first, because I’d been expecting a different type of book, something politically analytical. I changed my mind as the book became a galloping page-turner showing that truth really can be stranger than fiction.

I’m old enough to remember Thorpe as a glamorous figure: attractive, dapper (oh, those velvet-collared coats!) and very funny. From the first hint of scandal in Private Eye, when Auberon Waugh wrote about the mysterious shooting of a dog called Rinka, I followed the story avidly. John Preston gives an almost blow by blow account of events, relying very heavily on the testimony of Peter Bessell as written in a privately published memoir. I felt that Preston was too generous to Norman Scott but Scott, unlike Thorpe, is still alive and spoke to the author. The account of the trial is riveting, the verdict as astonishing today as it was then. Peter Cook’s Biased Judge sketch is amazingly close to the judge's actual summing up.
It’s unlikely that the full facts of the case will ever be known but John Preston has written a thorough account of the scandal as he has been able to piece it together.

A Very English Scandal is published by Penguin.

A Very English Scandal is a gripping account of the Thorpe affair, showing a scandal at the heart of British politics and how the establishment is set up to protect those in power. It is written in a straightforward narrative style, explaining how Jeremy Thorpe went from leader of the Liberal party to disgraced and on trial for conspiring to murder his former lover Norman Scott. Though the specific and detailed account is interesting, the real power of the book is how Preston shows the way in which this scandal - and, by implication, others - was affected and dominated by people at the heart of the establishment.

The narrative style gives an assertive picture of what happened, using the memoirs and information given by people involved, but sometimes relying on lurid details to make a more compelling read. This is not surprising from a book that focuses on scandal and how such details are covered up. Particularly uncomfortable are Preston’s mentions of individuals appearing in the affair in some way who had their own scandals - many of them child abuse - covered up by the establishment. A Very English Scandal is a readable and approachable account of the affair, of politics in the 1960s and 1970s, and perhaps most importantly, of how much is covered up by those in power in this country.