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9 things we learned from the book on which A Very English Scandal was based

The BBC’s adaptation of A Very English Scandal starring Hugh Grant and Ben Wishaw, which ends on Sunday, has been a big hit for BBC1.

Set in the 1960s and ’70s, it tells of how the Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe (Grant) tried to get his former lover Norman Scott (Wishaw) murdered.

Here are 9 things we learned from John Preston’s ‘non-fiction novel’ on which it was based.

1.    

Jeremy Thorpe – high-flying Liberal MP for North Devon – is staying at his mother’s house when he first has sex with a teenage horse riding instructor called Norman Scott
 
2.    

While coming to terms with his sexuality, Norman Scott joins a Trappist monastery in Ireland. He ends up having it off with one of the monks
 
3.    

Scott is later encouraged to enter a treatment centre in Dublin to “cure” him of his homosexuality. After an intensive week of hypnosis and sleep-induced treatment, he is discharged. Scott immediately goes to a Dublin bar, picks up a man and ends up having sex with him
 
4.    

Jeremy Thorpe’s mother Ursula – Jeremy calls her “Urse” –  wore a monocle, smoked cigars and was a stalwart of the local Conservative club. Despite being an active Tory, she is hugely supportive of her son’s Liberal ambitions. “He could have joined an anarchist collective and Ursula would have done whatever she could to advance his career,” says the author John Preston
 
5.    

Thorpe is rather baffled by heterosexuality. “Pedro,” he asks his fellow MP Peter Bessell one day. “How the hell do you fuck girls?” Thorpe goes on to recount a disastrous date with a female companion. “When I saw her on the bed, legs open, all I wanted to do was roar and roar with laughter”
 
6.    

Thorpe reports that his first attempts to have sex with this woman are interrupted by a chronic case of diarrhoea. “If I close my eyes and grit my teeth, I can manage it somehow,” says Thorpe of heterosexual sex. He ends up getting married twice and fathering a child
 
7.    

Thorpe meets his first wife, Caroline Allpass, while on holiday in Greece. On the day he meets her, Thorpe and a gay friend engage in a threesome on the beach with a male prostitute. Thorpe returns to London to discover that he has contracted gonorrhoea
 
8. 

Jeremy Thorpe dreams up various ways to kill Norman Scott. He first considers dumping his body in a river, as New York gangsters do, but realises that British rivers are shallower and less tidal. He then considers poisoning Scott and dumping his body down a disused mine shaft in Cornwall
 
9. 

Another plan is to lure Norman Scott to Florida and push him into a swamp. Thorpe’s potential hit man decides against this idea as he has a phobia of snakes