I don’t expect I shall read a better biography this year — or a more surprising one — than Michael Bloch’s impeccably researched and beautifully written life of the disgraced former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe (Little, Brown, £25). Though it was finished years ago — Thorpe himself was shown the draft manuscript in 2001 — the book’s explosive content was such that publication could only come after its subject’s death, which brought an end to the risk, almost the certainty, of a libel action.

The surprise does not come from discovery of the facts relating to Thorpe’s involvement in the plot to murder the former male model Norman Scott, thereby silencing his damaging allegations of a gay relationship with the politician. These were well rehearsed before, during and after the trial at which Thorpe and his co-defandants were acquitted, although we all believed they had done what was alleged.

No, the jaw-dropping revelations concern the flagrant nature of Thorpe’s secret gay life — rent boys, guardsmen et al — the details of which he was so determined to keep from public view.

With political colleagues, he was more relaxed. Peter Bessell, later to give damaging evidence against him, was appalled by his boasts of a reckless adventure with a New York street boy — picked up in Times Square and taken back to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. At the time, Thorpe had just become engaged to Caroline Allpass, his first wife, destined to die two years later in a car crash. She, says Bloch, was “well aware of Thorpe’s homosexuality and quite unshocked by it”. On the contrary, Bloch adds, she “was something of a ‘queer’s moll’”. Liberal MP, Emlyn Hooson, hearing of Scott’s allegations, tartly observed that, if true, they showed Thorpe to be “a cross between Horatio Bottomley and Oscar Wilde”.

The former was another Liberal MP who was jailed for seven years for his fraudulent sale of Victory Bonds. I used to stay at his house in East Sussex on visits to the Glyndebourne Festival. Not with him present, you understand; the property, which he built, is now Alfriston’s White Lodge Hotel.

The comparison with Wilde is appropriate, though Hooson wouldn’t have known it, in the sense that Thorpe appears to have derived from his gay life the same ‘feasting with panthers’ frisson enjoyed by the playwright.

Similarly, too, there is a strong Oxford link in the stories of both men. Oxford-educated Wilde met Lord Alfred Douglas, the petulant neurotic later to prove so damaging to him, while he was a student at Magdalen College. Oxford-educated Thorpe (Trinity College, Oxford Union president) met his nemesis Scott, likewise a basket case, while he was working at a stables in Kingham in 1960. The meeting was brief but, fatally, Thorpe revealed who he was and invited the tousle-haired 20-year-old to get in touch if he ever needed help or was in London.

Oxford Mail:

Soon after, Scott was admitted to the Littlemore Hospital’s Ashhurst clinic, after which he lived in the city in a threesome with two fellow patients, one a male homosexual. He next moved in with another close male friend in Church Enstone, attempting suicide when he took up with a girlfriend.

His readmission to the Ashurst was followed, immediately on release, by his visit to Thorpe at the House of Commons. It was after this that a relationship began — at the Surrey home of Thorpe’s dominating, monocle-wearing mother, Ursula — that was to be denied for the rest of his long, sad life by Thorpe.

That someone would resort to murder to keep his sexual nature secret seems absurd today. Thank heavens for that.