Spectator Books of the Year: A political scandal that trumps all others

The death of Jeremy Thorpe aged 85 in 2014 finally made it possible to tell his extraordinary story without fear of the libel laws. John Preston has seized the opportunity in his gripping account A Very English Scandal (Penguin/Viking, £16.99). The leader of a political party involved in a murder plot easily trumps any other political scandal of our times; but the fact that in the event it was only a dog that died gives the story an air of farce.

Apart from Thorpe himself, vain and intensely ambitious, Preston handles with great skill a cast of astonishing characters. These include Thorpe’s devoted ally, Peter Bessell, who later betrayed him; and his monocled, cigar-smoking mother, Ursula; not to mention the two lawyers who got him off the hook — the brilliant barrister George Carman and the grotesquely biased judge Sir Joseph Cantley. All the major players are now dead, apart from the troubled soul who started it all — Norman Scott, who lives on in a Dartmoor village with 70 hens, three horses, a parrot, a canary and five dogs.