[3] At the 1959 general election, he was the Liberal candidate in the Bodmin constituency, but lost to the sitting Conservative MP Sir Douglas Marshall.
[citation needed] For his last 15 years he lived with his wife by the beach in the town of Oceanside, California, where they ran a successful holiday rental business.
His evidence was controversially referred to by the judge Mr Justice Cantley, in his summing up, as "a tissue of lies";[7] as a key meeting concerning the conspiracy to murder occurred in varied locations in his statements.
[8] 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.
[5] The judge's summing-up to the jury just before their deliberations emphasised Thorpe's distinguished public record,[9] but he was scathing about all the principal prosecution witnesses: Bessell was a "humbug",[10] Scott a fraud, a sponger, a whiner, a parasite—"but of course he could still be telling the truth".
[12] This rather unusual summing-up was almost immediately heavily lampooned for what some perceived as a marked bias in Peter Cook's 1979 spoken-word comedy LP "Here Comes the Judge"; some[who?]