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A VERY ENGLISH SCANDAL

Sex, lies, and a murder plot in the houses of parliament.

by John Preston ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2016

A story of establishment and judicial misconduct that’s no longer pertinent—or even interesting.

Preston ( The Dig , 2016, etc.) revisits the 1970s scandal involving Jeremy Thorpe, Member of Parliament for North Devon and leader of Britain’s Liberal Party.

In what could be a juicy, salacious tale, the author chronicles what seems to have been a brief encounter dragged out over more than 20 years in the paranoid mind of the Parliamentarian and his pathetic victim. Thorpe met Norman Josiffe, a confused, mentally unstable young man, at Thorpe’s “friend’s” home, where Josiffe was working in the stables. Thorpe gave him his card and an invitation to turn to him if he ever had “problems with Van”—Brecht Van de Vater, Josiffe’s employer. Soon, Norman went to Thorpe intending to return a collection of insurance letters Van de Vater had saved. For their first meeting, in 1961, Thorpe invited Josiffe to stay with him at his mother’s house, where they began a short-lived affair. Josiffe’s life comes across as a mess of mental institutions, prescription drug addiction, and constant attempts to recover his National Insurance health card. In England, employers pay the premium for the card; in Josiffe’s case, responsibility lay first with Van de Vater and then Thorpe. Neither of them bothered to pay, and Josiffe’s fragile mind and desperate economic situation drove him to desperation. Enter Thorpe’s MP colleague, Peter Bessell, who stepped in to protect Thorpe by paying small sums to Josiffe. In Parliament, there is an unwritten law that a man’s private life is his own business. Thus, Josiffe’s accusations were swept under the table by everyone. Thorpe and Bessell, desperate for money for the party and themselves, found a savior in Jack Hayward, a Bahamas-based millionaire who provided them with cash. Still, Thorpe’s paranoia about Josiffe grew, and he proposed a murder plot. It was an absurd plan, but apparently not absurd enough to throw the affair into the news and the courts. Indeed, many readers may wonder why it’s necessary to revisit the whole episode now.

Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-59051-814-4

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Other Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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BOOK REVIEW

by John Preston

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, black writers week, a very english scandal is one of the best things you’ll watch this year.

Oscar-nominated director Stephen Frears (“ Dangerous Liaisons ,” “The Queen”) does his best work in over a decade, but it’s not for a film opening in theaters today. It’s in his directorial work on the three-part, roughly three-hour mini-series “A Very English Scandal,” debuting in its entirety today, June 29 th , on Amazon Prime. Frears has long been a great actor for directors, drawing some of the career-best work from performers like Michelle Pfeiffer , Helen Mirren , Annette Bening , Chiwetel Ejiofor , Daniel Day-Lewis , and John Cusack , among many others. Here, he brings the absolute best out of Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw , who give riveting performances in the telling of one of the U.K.’s most shocking political scandals. This is a must-see.

Grant plays Jeremy Thorpe, a powerful MP who also happened to be a closeted homosexual. In the mid-‘60s, he developed a relationship with Norman Scott (Whishaw), someone very much at the other end of the socioeconomic ladder. At least as it’s captured here, Norman was something of an acquisition for Jeremy, someone he could protect and predict. Tired of the danger of illegal one-night stands with men, Norman was something he could control. Until he couldn’t. After the two split, Norman became the secret for Jeremy that wouldn’t go away. And so he tried to have him murdered.

A character in the phenomenal third episode (the series starts strongly and only gets better) says that “This is the story of a liar meeting a fantasist.” Norman was the kind of young man who partied constantly and told stories to try and impress people around him. Whishaw perfectly portrays this man’s fascinating combination of vulnerability and strength. He gets that Norman honestly loved Jeremy, and that plays into why he refuses to be considered a fling. The look in his eyes when one of Jeremy’s colleagues who knows about the relationship verbally recognizes the honest emotion of it is poignant. Norman is a man who has been dismissed by everyone and was then seen by one of the most powerful men in the country. He refuses to let that go. In some ways, it's all he has.

On the other side of this remarkable acting achievement is the work of Hugh Grant, having one hell of a year with this and “ Paddington 2 ” (he should work with Whishaw, the voice of Paddington, all the time). Here, Grant is not only perfectly cast—his movie star looks conveying the powerful social position of his character—but he seems to fully understand the push and pull within Jeremy. Nothing is more important than his reputation and his political career, and it’s when his illegal love (homosexuality was illegal when they started dating) threatens his career that he lashes out. He would rather be dead than outed. Norman becomes a situation that he thought he completely controlled that ends up controlling him, and Grant captures that aspect of this fascinating story with remarkable subtlety. This could have been an exaggerated caricature of an awful man overrun with power, but Grant finds a way to make Jeremy engaging instead of merely a villain. And yet he never goes for sentimentality either. We come not to like Jeremy but to at least understand part of what he did, and that’s quite an accomplishment. It may be Grant’s best performance.

Frears and writer Russell T. Davies (“Doctor Who”) also refuse to overplay their hand when it comes to the salaciousness of it all. This is a scandal during which the sexuality of the defendant became more controversial than the allegation that he tried to have someone killed . Think about that. The skewed priority that values public perception over human life is there under the surface of all three hours of “A Very English Scandal,” and Frears and Davies fully understand that this is what created Jeremy Thorpe and made him into such a monster.

Davies and Frears work together to refine a perfect balance of tone. “A Very English Scandal” can be very humorous, especially as the attempted murder unfolds in such a dumb manner that it almost makes the criminals in “ I, Tonya ” look intelligent. And yet when it reaches its emotional peak in episode three, I found myself incredibly moved. And perhaps most refreshingly of all, “A Very English Scandal” zips by. In an era when almost every TV season is just too long, this is a quick-paced, jaunty three hours of your life. You won’t regret it.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Adapted from John Preston ’s book of the same name, A Very English Scandal chronicles the true story of a member of the British Parliament, Jeremy Thorpe ( Hugh Grant ) and his entanglement with one Norman Scott ( Ben Whishaw ), including a trial for conspiracy to murder. Taking place in the 1960s and 1970s, and starting out when homosexuality was considered a crime in England, the miniseries (written by Russell T. Davies and directed by Stephen Frears ) is a fast-paced and quirk-filled account of the lengths Thorpe went to to keep Scott silent about their relationship. Aided by his close friend Peter Bessell ( Alex Jennings ), Thorpe ends up on a continuous collision course with the scorned Scott that takes outrageous twists and turns over three hourlong episodes.

The crux of this particular scandal is not drama though, but farce, as the toffs (Thorpe and Bessell) plot Scott’s murder nonchalantly, eventually hiring some of the most incompetent possible accomplices to carry out the deed (or at least, attempt to — badly). It’s high comedy if only because, ultimately, no one gets hurt. But even before that, during Scott and Thorpe’s alleged romance, there is no time for sentimentality or romance. “Turn around; all fours will do it,” Thorpe instructs Scott after entering his room one night and placing a jar of petroleum jelly matter-of-factly on his nightstand. “And then?” Bessell asks, intrigued, as Thorpe recounts the event to him later at a posh lunch club. “And then we did the deed,” Thorpe replies, with Bessell shaking his head and exclaiming “Gosh!”

The combination of the primness of Thorpe and his political world at that time versus the “vulgarity” that Scott brings to table with all of his pizazz is humorous, but it’s also representative of the larger societal views of homosexuality at that time. Thorpe jokes that he and Bessell are just “two old queens,” as Bessell explains he’s 80/20 in favor of women, sexually, whereas Thorpe admits he’s the opposite. But later, Bessell tells Thorpe that he thinks Scott — who is very open with his sexuality and doesn’t mind detailing all of his exploits to anyone who will listen — may be “the bravest man in the world.” And yet, Scott (like Thorpe) gets married to a woman, and has a son.

The story is filled with marriages, divorces, deaths (including suicides, or suspected suicides), but those deaths are not played for laughs. What makes A Very English Scandal land, and not careen too far into silliness, is how genuinely grounded it is. At one point, Scott breaks down in front of a kindly bar owner with the name Friendship, saying he doesn’t know why people are so good to him wherever he goes. Scott, as Whishaw plays him, is himself kind, charming, and unique. He can be a bit of mess, overly dramatic, and vindictive, but no one’s perfect. Everything in the miniseries comes down to Scott not having his National Insurance Card, which allows him to work or collect benefits, which Thorpe was supposed to get for him. It’s such a funny line, which Scott utters over and over again, because it’s also such a simple bureaucratic token that could have probably saved Thorpe a lot of problems if he had dealt with it from the start (Scott, who is still alive today, reportedly still does not have the card).

A Very English Scandal is, as advertised, very English. There’s a joke that hinges on a would-be killer looking for Scott all over Dunstable instead of Barnstable (can you imagine !) Davies’ script is light and witty, and Frears doubles down on jokes by often both showing and telling, to fantastic effect. The dapper discussions of murder techniques are one thing, and the snappy dialogue another (“He says somebody wants to kill me!” Scott wails to a friend. “Why have you changed your shirt?” she asks. “Well, he’s very good looking,” Scott says as he trots out the door), but the in its third hour things become ever so slightly  more serious. It comes at the right time, in a series that probably could have been trimmed to two parts. Thorpe is asked why, after innumerable dalliances over the years, he chose Scott as the one to have a relationship with, and perhaps even love (before rather unceremoniously dumping him). Thorpe is thoughtful and careful, with Hugh Grant as inscrutably charming as ever. He theorizes, over quick scenes of his own meet-ups gone wrong (assault, theft, and more), that perhaps Scott — in his sweetness and boldness as a gay man — was “the best.” And also, in the end, his undoing.

Rating: ★★★★

A Very English Scandal premieres Friday, June 29th on Amazon Prime.

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A Very English Scandal review – Jeremy Thorpe’s fall continues to fascinate

O nce upon a time in north Devon I was briefly acquainted with Jeremy Thorpe . To be precise, I ran against him as the Labour candidate in the 1970 general election. At the time, being young and impressionable, I rather admired him. Indeed, even with the benefit of hindsight, I retain a sneaking regard for the Jeremy of old. For all his sins, and as we now know they were many, he was witty, charming, charismatic and possessed a fundamental streak of decency. He was sound on issues such as race, the death penalty and membership of the Common Market (as it was then known), none of which endeared him to most of his constituents in what was a highly marginal constituency.

What’s more, he had galvanised politics in sleepy north Devon. The electoral turnout was an impressive 85% and a crowd of several thousands attended the eve-of-poll meetings and the declaration of the result. He had enormous energy. Each day in the final week of the campaign, he would tour the country by helicopter, visiting perhaps four or five constituencies in places as far away as north Wales, Manchester and Orpington. By evening, he’d be back in time for a whistlestop tour of local villages, chalking up another three or four meetings a night.

He assiduously cultivated his reputation as a man who never forgot a face, a feat I suspect owed more to the skills of his assiduous agent, Lillian Prowse. Once, on market day, I ran into him in the main street in Barnstaple. I was accompanied by a young woman whom he made a great show of recognising (though he clearly didn’t), affecting to know her father and various other relatives. The following week, accompanied by the same young woman, I came across him again and he repeated the entire charade, without any apparent recollection of our previous encounter.

What we didn’t know, of course, indeed it was a secret known only to a handful of people, was that there was another Jeremy Thorpe. One quite different from the urbane, amusing, self-confident public figure known to the public. This Jeremy Thorpe, a repressed homosexual, was up to his neck in subterfuge and intrigue and embroiled in a conspiracy to murder. By 1970, the long fuse that would eventually lead to his destruction had already been lit.

The basic facts have long been in the public domain. After a chance meeting in 1960, Thorpe commenced a sexual relationship with a young man called Norman Josiffe, who later changed his surname to Scott. At the time, such relationships were illegal in the UK. Once the affair was over, Scott, a pathetic young man who, in the author’s words, “had a remarkable capacity to make people feel sorry for him”, began to plague Thorpe with demands for financial and other help.

Initially, Thorpe, by now leader of the Liberal party, with the help of fellow Liberal MP Peter Bessell, tried to placate and then to buy off Scott, but he would not go quietly, popping up at regular intervals with new demands and always in the background was the implied threat that he would make public the cache of embarrassing letters in his possession. As Thorpe became more desperate, he began to contemplate extreme measures. In October 1975, on a lonely road on the edge of Exmoor, a lone gunman shot dead Scott’s dog, a great dane called Rinka, and apparently attempted to kill Scott. Until then, the press had been reluctant to pursue the story, but from then on it was only a question of time until the truth leaked out.

In May 1976, Thorpe resigned as leader of the Liberal party. Remarkably, he contested the 1979 election, despite awaiting trial on charges of incitement and conspiracy to murder. Inevitably he was defeated. Shortly afterwards, alongside three other men, he went on trial at the Old Bailey. After a summing up in which the judge left the jury in no doubt where his sympathies lay, Thorpe and his fellow defendants were acquitted.

That in a nutshell is the story and John Preston’s book is by no means the first on the subject, although he has tapped several new sources. To say, as his publishers do, that “the trial of Jeremy Thorpe changed our society for ever” is an exaggeration. To be sure, it was sensational, but not life-changing for anyone except those most intimately involved. What changed Britain for ever was the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in 1967 and the change in public attitudes that eventually followed. Had Thorpe been active in politics today, he might never have needed to go to such lengths to conceal his sexuality, let alone resort to inciting murder.

What can be said, however, is that this is probably the most forensic, elegantly written and compelling account of one of the 20th century’s great political scandals and it could not have been told in its entirety while Thorpe, who died in December 2014, was alive. It’s a real page-turner. An entertaining mix of tragedy and farce, involving people in high and low places, amply justifying its subtitle, “Sex, Lies and a Murder Plot at the Heart of the Establishment”. What emerges most clearly is that, far from being conceived in the heat of the moment (“Who will rid me of this troublesome gay?”), Thorpe repeatedly and over a period of years urged his friends to murder Scott.

The cast of characters is a biographer’s dream. The Right Hon Jeremy Thorpe, a product of Eton and Oxford, flamboyant, amusing, charming, ruthless, a man who, according to one who knew him, was addicted to risk. Norman Scott, who went through life leaving a trail of chaos, always expecting others to clear up after him. Peter Bessell, a dodgy businessman and serial womaniser with “a lounge-lizard voice”, who left in his wake a trail of debts and who, after years of slavish loyalty to Thorpe, eventually shopped him. “Despite all evidence,” says the author, “Bessell regarded himself as a man of high ideals.” And Jack Hayward, a well-meaning, Bahamas-based multimillionaire whose money, unbeknown to him, was being used to pay for an assassin.

Despite his acquittal, Thorpe’s reputation never recovered and he faded into obscurity. Latterly, his health deteriorated to the point where he became a shell of the man he once was. To the end of his days, he craved rehabilitation, writing to anyone who he thought might be able to help him secure a peerage. I received a couple of such letters. In an interview not long before he died, Thorpe remarked: “If it happened now, the public would be kinder.” As regards his homosexuality perhaps, but not attempted murder.

Chris Mullin was MP for Sunderland South from 1987 to 2010.

A Very English Scandal is published by Viking (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £12.99

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A Very English Scandal: Sex, Lies, and a Murder Plot at the Heart of the Establishment Kindle Edition

• Print length 354 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Other Press
• Publication date October 11, 2016
• File size 3247 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• See all details

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About the author.

John Preston is the author of three highly acclaimed novels as well as a nonfiction travel book, Touching the Moon , which was short-listed for the W. H. Smith Literary Award. He writes for London's Daily Mail and Sunday Telegraph .

Matthew Brenher , originally from London, now lives in Los Angeles. His theatrical background includes performances in no fewer than twenty Shakespearean productions, including Macbeth , Twelfth Night , Measure for Measure , As You Like It , Julius Caesar , A Midsummer Night's Dream , Romeo in Romeo & Juliet , and the title role in Henry V . In Los Angeles, he played Claudius in Hamlet , Cassio in Othello , Antony in Antony & Cleopatra , Antipholous of Syracuse in Comedy of Errors , and Orsino in Twelfth Night . Other theater includes: Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights , Trigorin in The Seagull , Alistair in Shaw's The Millionairess , Jerry in Pinter's Betrayal , the title role in Dracula , and George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf , for which he was awarded best performance by a lead actor/drama by Stage Scene LA 2009-2010. He's performed in new plays, most recently in A Bitter Fruit for Palestine , Vulcan in Love's Mistress at the famous Globe theater in London, and Petko in an acclaimed production of The Mapletree Game . On television, he played Mad Marcus for six months in the now defunct British soap Brookside . Other television includes: Rules of Engagement , Bodyguards , The Blind Date , Starhunter , The Grid , Eastenders , and Nostradamus . Films include Execution , A Midsummer Nights Dream , Stay Shy , and The Boy Who would Be King . He works in commercials and industrials and is an accomplished voice-over artist.

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01AQNYOVQ
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Other Press (October 11, 2016)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 11, 2016
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 3247 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 354 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0241983894
• #288 in 20th Century History of the UK
• #732 in History of LGBTQ+ & Gender Studies
• #1,325 in Biographies of Political Leaders

About the author

John preston.

John Preston is the arts editor and television critic of the Sunday Telegraph. He is the author of three highly acclaimed novels, including Kings of the Roundhouse (2005), and a travel book, Touching the Moon. He lives in London.

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‘a very english scandal’: tv review.

'A Very English Scandal,' Amazon's thoroughly winning, shocking and funny miniseries from the BBC, Stephen Frears and Russell T. Davies (starring Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw), has to be seen to be believed.

By Tim Goodman

Tim Goodman

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There is an eccentric bit of electricity that runs through A Very English Scandal , one of the tightest and brightest and most sublime miniseries — running at a meager three hours, one hour per episode — that you’re likely to see on television in 2018. It has, for starters, four people exercising their considerable talents in an almost effortless way: director Stephen Frears ( The Queen, etc.), screenwriter Russell. T. Davies ( Doctor Who, Queer as Folk ) and actors Hugh Grant ( About A Boy ) and Ben Whishaw ( London Spy ). And it’s all based on a true story almost too weird, funny and heartbreaking to be real, complete with a bizarre twist that popped up just this month after it aired in England.

Created by the BBC and airing on Amazon starting Friday, A Very English Scandal is based on the book by John Preston that documents the downfall of Jeremy Thorpe (Grant), the British MP who was the leader of the Liberal Party from 1967 to 1976 before he was accused of conspiracy to commit murder in a case involving his former lover, Norman Scott (Whishaw).

Air date: Jun 29, 2018

Thorpe was an upper-class, highly educated man from a family with a long history in British politics. His career took off in the early 1960s when the country had very strict laws against homosexuality (the laws weren’t changed until 1967 and Thorpe, still hiding his past, was there to help usher in the change).

What makes A Very English Scandal such a weirdly fascinating romp through history is that Frears and Davies make a brilliant decision to tell this story as a careening, jaunty tale that is darkly funny throughout but spends its most powerful moments lingering on the despair of gay men during those times (not just Scott and Thorpe) — while very subtly illustrating that Thorpe’s entitlement and upbeat public persona hid the coldness of a sociopath. While it’s indeed very English to have a stiff upper lip and hide feelings publicly behind a smile for the sake of appearances, Thorpe was a special case. His zeal to hide his sexuality (he was married twice) had some elements of shame but was mostly based on keeping his career afloat.

Grant’s tremendous performance rests importantly on his ability to convey that Thorpe talked openly about having Scott killed without ever giving the impression that this was either wrong or a terrible and unnecessary idea.

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In fact, one of the strangest, funniest parts of A Very English Scandal is that Thorpe had Scott’s National Insurance Card (essential for Scott to work and get healthcare, especially the pills he needed to combat the mental illness was suffering from) but likely misplaced it and never had the time or inclination to do the work necessary to replace it — which might have kept Scott, a sweet but troubled loose cannon, from causing him untold amounts of trouble through the years.

Grant’s performance, by the way, at first seems so stilted and mannered as to be a parody, but according to the British press (where the series was highly acclaimed) everybody close to Thorpe agrees its spot-on — and Grant is already being mentioned as a slam-dunk BAFTA nominee. Indeed, Grant’s performance is a tour-de-force, mostly because Thorpe himself was such an odd bird. But Grant does fine work in the subtler moments that humanize Thorpe, such as when Thorpe allows himself to realize that he really did love Scott and that his earlier, closeted and dangerous days hiding his sexuality were some of the saddest of his life (and that his sham marriages have left him more alone than ever).

Whishaw is also fantastic in bringing multiple shades to his portrayal. When we first meet Norman his last name is Josiffe (how and why he eventually changes is it is both funny and sad), he’s fresh from a psychiatric hospital and working in the stables in a remote farm tending horses. Norman loves animals and people and his naivete — you might argue that he’s more dim than innocent — means he’s forever broke, desperate and vulnerable. Norman is also fearlessly gay at a time when there was a lot to be fearful of, which makes him both stronger than he’s perceived to be and risky, which is probably why Thorpe believed there was only one way to deal with him (of course, if he’d only just returned the National Insurance Card…).

Series that are based on true history shouldn’t be protected from spoilers, and it takes nothing away from A Very English Scandal to know that Norman wasn’t murdered. In fact, the absolute bungling of the attempted murder is part of British lore — the would-be assassin, Andrew “Gino” Newton, was a rural pilot who was convinced to do the killing after drinking 16 pints at a pub. Later, his lame-brained scheme involved driving Scott to a remote countryside area and killing him, but the guileless Scott brought along his Great Dane, Rinka, and Newton, afraid of dogs, ended up shooting Rinka first before the gun jammed, allowing Scott to flee.

Newton served a short time in prison for killing the dog (he lied initially about his run-in with Scott, protecting Thorpe), then sold his story to the press upon being released, implicating Thorpe and three others.

(Somewhat hilariously, the events of A Very English Scandal returned to the headlines this month after another man said he had told police he, too, was approached, probably before Newton, to kill Scott. The case was being considered for reopening. The man’s initial statement appears to have been covered up and he alleged that it was a police/political scandal to protect Thorpe and the Liberal Party. That prompted the investigation to be moved to a separate police department, which dropped the inquiry when they determined Newton was dead. He wasn’t. He had changed his name and was living in another small village, calling into a radio station about the best way to remove mold from a shower curtain and writing articles for a magazine dedicated to pilots. The British press said Newton, now living under that new name, was found rather easily via Google.)

There are so many true moments in A Very English Scandal where it’s hard to believe Thorpe wasn’t found out years earlier. In fact, the trial is full of forehead-slapping moments and led to a legendary British comedy bit about it. There are also so many oddball elements — both funny and shocking — that you sometimes can’t believe how strange the lives of Thorpe and Scott actually were. As Frears and Davies almost whimsically tackle this story — if it were fiction nobody would believe it — they succeed most impressively in cutting through the absurdity to find the innate sadness within.

In a mere three hours — it could easily have been stretched to six — that’s an impressive achievement. And maybe the brevity of it all and the stylistic choices are what make it work. A Very English Scandal is almost absurd, except that the story is both true and deeply tragic.

Cast: Hugh Grant, Ben Whishaw, Alex Jennings Written by: Russell T. Davies Directed by: Stephen Frears Premieres: Friday ( Amazon )

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A Very English Scandal review

A Very English Scandal, written by Russell T. Davies and directed by Stephen Frears was sensational in every sense of the word…

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Warning: contains spoilers for all three episodes

You couldn’t make it up. Well, Russell T. Davies could, because he’s brilliant, but he didn’t. As advertised at the beginning of all three instalments,  A Very English Scandal  is based on a true story, one told first by the national press and then retold by John Preston in his 2014 book of the same name, subtitled  Sex, Lies and a Murder Plot at the Heart of the Establishment . 

If it sounds outrageous, that’s because it was. The conspiracy to murder Norman Scott, the secret ex-lover of former Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe, was balls-to-the-wall bonkers. This retelling written by Davies and directed by Stephen Frears, revels in the farcical details – Thorpe’s repeated insistence on the murder, the ineptitude of the co-conspirators, the failed assassination attempt that resulted in a dead Great Dane and a still-alive Norman Scott… It was, by any measure you wish to use, a ludicrous series of events.

The scandal’s absurd twists and unlikely characters are played here for knockabout laughs. The three-part drama is lively and funny and joyously irreverent, a thumbed nose to propriety that delights in showing the old boys’ club with its knickers down. 

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Alongside the comedy, and—always Davies’ particular genius—not a bit undermined by it though, is the utter tragedy of it all. The devastation wreaked in gay lives by criminalisation. The law’s insistence on furtiveness and secrecy that made such a practised liar of Jeremy Thorpe. And most of all, the unjust mechanism that allowed the establishment to pull up the drawbridge and protect itself from outliers like Scott.

Thorpe and his pals were acquitted of all charges, thanks to a ruthless (and no doubt ruthlessly expensive) barrister, and a judge so partisan he might have been written for an episode of  Poldark  instead of an episode of real life. The toffs closed ranks, Thorpe punched the air and kissed his wife, then the cameras stopped rolling.

You come away from the final episode amused, yes, but feeling the human toll. Dotted across this vibrantly told tale are patches of earnestness that trip you up. Lord Arran’s moving speech about his gay brother’s suicide. Jeremy Thorpe’s hesitating, caveat and flashback-filled explanation of what, aside from the obvious, he saw in Scott. Peter Bessell admiringly calling Scott, who was publicly ridiculed and attacked for his sexuality but nonetheless refused to hide it, “the bravest man in Britain”. It might have the momentum of a high-speed train and a bubbly Murray Gold caper score, but this drama is no lightweight.

The direction, music and editing all keep things moving expertly, but the writing is the thing. I love a Russell T. Davies script. They feel like being driven very fast by someone wearing a clown suit, who knows all of humanity’s saddest secrets. One as exhilaratingly done as this, and with such a fine cast has been like Christmas every Sunday night for the past three weeks.

The cast is very fine indeed. Hugh Grant has all the brains and comic timing needed to make Thorpe a convincing prospect in every situation—in parliament, in members’ clubs, at the dinner table and in the bedroom, towel and tub of Vaseline in hand. By all accounts, his performance is a remarkable mimicry as well as everything else. Ben Whishaw as the pathetic yet flinty, funny yet endearing Scott would be a revelation were he not always this bloody good. Alex Jennings as Peter Bessell, David Bamber as Lord Arran, Jason Watkins as Emlyn Hooson… there are no weak links.

If the men are good, then the women keep stealing the thing out from under them. With only a handful of scenes, it’s remarkable what an impression Eve Myles makes as Gwen Parry-Jones in episode two. The same goes for Monica Dolan as Thorpe’s second wife Marion, and Patricia Hodge as his mother Ursula.

It was exhilarating and dynamic, this tragicomedy of errors, without sacrificing the ability to say something serious amid all the madness. A sensational adaptation, in every sense of the word.

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A Very English Scandal is available now on BBC iPlayer .

Louisa Mellor | @Louisa_Mellor

Louisa Mellor is the Den of Geek UK TV Editor. She has written about TV, film and books for Den of Geek since 2010, and for…

Roush Review: ‘A Very English Scandal’ Serves Viewers But Not Justice

A Very English Scandal

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Corruption of the soul blots the fabled handsomeness of Hugh Grant as the embattled central figure of A Very English Scandal . Unlike ABC’s own now-shuttered Scandal , this is riveting because it’s absolutely true.

With rare economy over three witty and jauntily devastating episodes, writer Russell T Davies ( Torchwood ) and director Stephen Frears ( The Queen ) adapt John Preston’s book about Jeremy Thorpe (Grant), a politician of monstrously hypocritical character.

'Goliath,' 'Suits' and More Coming to Amazon in June 2018

From 1967 to 1976, he led Parliament’s Liberal Party — when he wasn’t secretly and haplessly plotting to kill his pesky ex-lover, Norman Scott (a typically brilliant Ben Whishaw).

Clueless Norman, a ragamuffin who just wants his national insurance card, threatens Thorpe’s well-honed public image with his repeated entreaties, never dreaming of the lethal consequences.

When a hit goes awry, Norman takes his story public, resulting in a sensational trial that sends Thorpe into deeper, soul-chilling denial. Justice may not be served, but the lucky viewer is.

A Very English Scandal , Series Premiere, Friday, June 29, Amazon Prime Video

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‘A Very British Scandal’ Review: Claire Foy Gives Up the Crown

The actress known for her young Elizabeth II returns as a noblewoman with a startlingly different story.

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By Mike Hale

Claire Foy won our hearts, and an Emmy, as the doughty young Elizabeth II in the first two seasons of “The Crown.” She returns to the small screen on Friday in a nasty bit of business called “A Very British Scandal” on Amazon Prime Video. As the Duchess of Argyll, a career socialite caught in a tawdry divorce, her technique is as flawless as ever. But if she wins your heart, you might want to have your valves checked.

“A Very British Scandal” is from the producers of “A Very English Scandal” (2018), another three-hour Amazon-BBC mini-series that recounts a real-life tabloid firestorm among the British privileged classes. “Very English,” with Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw at the top of their forms, was wonderful (it’s also available on Prime), and that lineage — along with the casting of two comparably fine performers, Foy and Paul Bettany, as the battling duchess and duke — raised hopes for “Very British.”

Those hopes, for this viewer at least, have been dashed, but your mileage may vary. If you were unhappy with the way the earlier show exploited the farcical humor latent in its characters’ outré and self-destructive behavior, then “A Very British Scandal” may be for you. The behavior is equally lamentable, but there’s barely a shred of humor to be found.

The duchess and duke are Margaret Whigham, the daughter of a rich Scottish businessman, and Ian Campbell, a captain in the British army in World War II who lucked into the Argyll title when a fairly distant cousin died without an heir. The series covers the 16 years of their relationship, culminating in their vicious and highly public divorce in 1963.

Their liaison begins, in plain view, while Ian is still married to his second wife, and the optics don’t get better from there. Ian uses Margaret’s money to restore the rundown Argyll castle, finance a fanciful project to salvage a Spanish treasure ship and keep himself in a semi-constant state of spiteful drunkenness. Margaret grouses to her friends, spends much of her time in the company of other men and embarks on a plan, involving forged letters and the purchase of a male child, to cheat Ian’s sons out of their inheritance.

Faced with a story like this, one common strategy is some degree of satire; that’s the route the director Stephen Frears and the writer Russell T. Davies took in “Very English,” while maintaining the full humanity of their sad characters. Another time-honored way to go is heightened melodrama: The couple’s wretched treatment of each other (and of most of the other people onscreen) is redeemed by their great but misbegotten love.

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A Very English Scandal Revisits an Affair That’s Stranger Than Fiction

The Amazon miniseries starring Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw is based on a real-life moment in British politics that gripped the tabloids in the late 1970s.

As the title suggests, A Very English Scandal is riddled with symptoms and symbols of the British Establishment. The three-part miniseries has dogs. It has monocle-sporting aristocrats and long lunches at the Carlton Club. It has grown men referring to each other affectionately as “bunny.” And, most prominently, it has the central storyline of an ambitious, Eton-educated, closeted politician conspiring to have his ex-lover murdered by a squad of amateur hit men, in an assassination plot so farcical it involves nipple tassels, whipped cream, and the sitcom Dad’s Army.

Truth is stranger, etc. etc. The real-life scandal of Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of Britain’s Liberal party, consumed the tabloids in the late 1970s, when he was charged and tried for attempting to arrange the murder of Norman Scott, an itinerant former model and stable hand with whom Thorpe had a sexual relationship. Scott survived the bungled late-night shooting in the middle of Exmoor (his Great Dane Rinka, sadly, didn’t, which led to popular jokes about “the dog in the fog”). And the two eventually faced off in court, during which time the U.K. newspapers dissected every salacious detail of Scott’s testimony.

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A Very English Scandal , whose three episodes are released on Amazon Friday, stars the inimitable Hugh Grant as Thorpe, in the first significant television role of the actor’s career. In the series, Thorpe is already established as a Liberal politician when he meets Scott ( SPECTRE and London Spy’ s Ben Whishaw) in 1961. From the beginning the relationship between the two is based on an imbalance of power, which Thorpe fully exploits, both emotionally and sexually. He pays for Scott to live in a dingy studio, and writes him letters in which he refers to them both as “bunnies”—a reference to how Scott looked like a frightened rabbit on their first night together.

Soon, the relationship goes sour, and Scott, who’s suffered from anxiety and nervous breakdowns in the past, reports Thorpe to the police as having “infected” him with homosexuality (which was a crime in the U.K. until 1967). From there, the conflict between the two escalates. The writer Russell T. Davies ( Queer as Folk, Doctor Who ), who adapted the series from John Preston’s novel, unfurls the story from Thorpe’s perspective at first, conveying the awkwardness and the risk involved in Thorpe trying to find someone he can confide in. His initial chats with his fellow Liberal MP Peter Bessell (Alex Jennings) are cheerily risqué, but as Scott becomes a more urgent threat to Thorpe’s reputation, Thorpe reveals the stakes. “If anything about me ever became public ... I would put a gun to my head and blow my brains out,” he states. “Then I shall protect you,” Bessell replies.

A Very English Scandal continues to swing back and forth in this manner between madcap farce and historical tragedy. It’s a tone that reflects how British tabloids have always engaged with the immensely profitable act of public shaming, showcasing personal disgrace and downfall with a wink and a nudge. But Davies—and the director Stephen Frears ( My Beautiful Laundrette, The Queen )—reminds viewers that the exposure of a closeted Englishman is more serious than it might seem. During the first episode, Bessell consults Lord Arran, an eccentric Conservative politician trying to decriminalize homosexuality. The scene is played for laughs (badgers and paté feature prominently), until Arran reveals the reason for his mission: His own gay brother killed himself, and he’s determined to try and save other men from the fear of being outed.

Still, the tone doesn’t always jibe. Grant is intriguingly cast as Thorpe, portraying the politician’s general geniality and charisma as well as his penchant for risk-taking and his sense of entitlement. What isn’t always apparent, primarily because of the humor of the writing, is the kind of malevolence and desperation that could compel a man to try to have another man killed. There are flashes of murder in Grant’s eyes, and he’s most persuasive when communicating Thorpe’s devastation. But the assassination plot is treated with such a light touch that it’s hard to take much meaning from it.

Playing Scott, Whishaw deftly shows how the younger man is both Thorpe’s opposite and his peer. Scott is depicted as an unstable fantasist at first, repeatedly seeming to blackmail Thorpe (and writing Thorpe’s mother a seven-page letter including details about their affair). What Scott and Thorpe appear to have in common is an ability to hold others in thrall, relying heavily on their ability to manipulate people. But Whishaw also conveys Scott’s desire to be loved, and how his anger at the way Thorpe has treated him is more about sadness than revenge. Thorpe’s limited comprehension of his own sexuality is based purely on physical acts—he doesn’t seem to have the capacity or the luxury to imagine that men might actually love each other.

As an autopsy of one of the darker moments in recent British political disgrace, A Very English Scandal is a spry and surprisingly funny work. In under three hours, it includes all the relevant tabloid focal points (the “sick dog” comment, the witless petty criminals, the infernal National Insurance card). But it’s most effective at rendering how tragic and needless the whole Thorpe affair was, turning public bigotry into private shame into ritual mortification. In court, Scott maintains that he never cared about Thorpe’s money. What he does care about, he says, is how “all the history books get written with men like me missing.” In A Very English Scandal , he’s at last given equal billing.