Paul Bessell, Finding Dad

 Paul Bessell, Finding Dad (Mirror Books)

What a mess, says Peter Bessell somewhere in the middle of this book. Whatever his talents were not- like business, honesty or 'faithfulness'- he was a genius of understatement. It comes before he is dragged back into a mire of problems in the trial of Jeremy Thorpe but after his downward-spiralling business disasters had led him to intend to commit suicide.

At first a success as a local entrepreneur and then MP, he expanded his horizons with ambitions that proved beyond his ability to sustain them and was soon out of his depth and accumulating unmanageable debt. He had been a lay preacher, a serial ladies' man and had nearby neighbouring fellow Liberal, Jeremy Thorpe, as his closest friend but the wreckless, fantasist party leader proved the paragon example of a friend that with the like of which one didn't need enemies. Having done a disappearing act to evade his creditors and somehow restored some equilibrium to his life, his earlier attempts to help Thorpe rid himself of Norman Scott, the troublesome part-time model, came back to do more than haunt him.

In California with his long-term mistress, the faithfulness that Bessell could never show to his wife or other girlfriends was ill-advisedly much more resolute in how he stood by Thorpe who had less compunction about selling him down the river. The charismatic but deeply flawed Thorpe had once brilliantly lampooned Harold MacMillan by re-working John 15:13 by suggesting that Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life but then was guilty of it himself. And yet it was that constancy that finally finished Bessell when, having no choice but to testify against him, it was Thorpe that was acquitted. Bessell's problem seemed to be that he never had much choice, not even being able to kill himself when he wanted to.

That Thorpe should need to rely on and then abandon such a dodgy, thin-ice operator as Bessell in the first place is indicative of what a ramshackle outfit the resurgent Liberal party of the 1970's was. If charm, generosity and this level of devotion to such a charlatan were Bessell's good points then his weaknesses both outnumbered and overpowered them. Paul Bessell's reconstruction of the story is understandably as sympathetic as any account by a son who loved his father can be expected to be but, desperate though his downfall is, it's not easy for anybody else to have a lot of sympathy for a liar, fraudster and one unfit for the high stakes games he chose to play. One's sympathy is for his wife, Pauline, who knew precious little of his triple life and rackety schemes.

A Very English Scandal (2018) was a farcically funny account of the Thorpe Affair but Finding Dad is harder to laugh at. Paul Bessell is thorough in putting together so much detail about the labyrinthine duplicity of a plot no fiction writer could invent and one reads through encounters with Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, two US presidents and the outskirts of the mafia with disbelief, sadness or horror but not to humorous effect.

It's to full of immorality for a morality tale and the hero has the wrong ratio of heroism to fatal flaws for it to be Shakesperean tragedy. It is more likely an insight into what sort of things are always going on with even Paul having to accept he didn't get to the bottom of it, like what sort of 'secret work' his father was doing, if any, for the American government or if it was simply an effective cover for the way he duped several women who thought they loved him into thinking that he loved only them. 

Having been reading three books at the same time, it was this that took over and was finished first. Not necessarily the best book but in some ways the most gripping and, in a competitive field, the most lurid. It's not to my credit that I was drawn to it over the others.