Peter Bessell

Early life Peter Bessell was born at a nursing home in Bath, son of tailor Joseph Edgar Bessell and Olive Simons, née Hawkins. His parents divorced in 1926 and Bessell lived with his father. He was educated at Lynwyd School, Bath, and when his father died in 1940, Bessell took over the business. Bessell became a Congregational lay preacher in 1939, remaining so until 1970; on this basis he registered as a conscientious objector during the Second World War.

Career He first stood for parliament as a Liberal in Torquay in both the 1955 general election, and the by-election there later that year.

In the 1960s Peter Bessell was a member of Mebyon Kernow as well as the Liberal Party.

Bessell did not contest the 1970 general election, when the Liberal candidate Paul Tyler lost Bodmin to the Conservative Robert Hicks.

In 1970, he opened a finance brokerage on Fifth Avenue in New York and continued this business, both in London and New York, until early 1974 when the businesses collapsed and, after briefly fleeing to Mexico to avoid his creditors,

In order to appear at the 1979 Jeremy Thorpe trial in London, Bessell was offered and acquired immunity from prosecution for previous debts, although he offered to waive this.

Thorpe affair

He was a prosecution witness at the trial of Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe for the attempted murder of Norman Scott in 1979, the Thorpe affair, when he returned to Britain to testify in exchange for immunity from prosecution. His evidence was controversially referred to by the judge Mr Justice Cantley, in his summing up, as "a tissue of lies"; as a key meeting concerning the conspiracy to murder occurred in varied locations in his statements.

Bessell revealed under questioning that he had signed a contract with The Sunday Telegraph for the serialisation rights of his memoirs, and that his fee (£25,000) would double were Thorpe to be convicted.

Personal life He married three times: Joyce Margaret Thomas (1943–49), who died prematurely from tuberculosis; and Pauline Colledge, whom he divorced in 1978 to marry Diane Miller, his long-term mistress.

In popular culture Bessell was portrayed by Alex Jennings in the 2018 BBC One miniseries A Very English Scandal.