Peter Bessell was a British Member of Parliament, publicly described as a rogue; an MI6 agent; an MI5 agent; a secret advisor to the US government; a South African BOSS spy; a fraud; a charlatan; a lounge lizard; a murderer; a compulsive liar; a fantasist; a ‘grass’; a ‘man who operated in the shadowy world of politicians, bankers, fixers, con men, and criminals’; and a sex addict.
These descriptions were not made as some tittle tattle between courses at private dinner parties, they were made by respected people and mainstream publications. It was a judge who called him a liar, and Henry Kissinger who referred to him as a charlatan. What kind of man attracts this level of abuse, and how much of it was true?
‘Finding Dad’ is the extraordinary story of Paul Bessell’s uncomfortable discovery of the truth about Peter Bessell, his father, set against a background of astonishing business and political corruption. As a one-time pillar of the establishment and jet-setting financier, Bessell gained international notoriety as the chief prosecution witness in the Jeremy Thorpe trial. But his life was much more than the Thorpe affair.
Drawing from extensive research from previously unseen, extensive archives left by his parents, the US and UK National Archives, Paul takes us on a compelling quest to reconcile all the upsetting things he had been told, and read, about his father against his own memories of the gentle, generous and kind man he loved.
The story takes readers through the glamorous political and business worlds of 1960s and 70s London and New York, through mysterious work on behalf of governments, and – via fraud, murder plots and sex – to the Old Bailey and the ‘trial of the century’.
