What transforms this story from one about a colourful political also-ran into something different entirely is, of course, the fact that in 1979 Thorpe found himself on trial for incitement to murder the sometime model Norman Scott. It matters not at all that Thorpe was acquitted; he was destroyed (although this seemingly took some time to sink in), and Bloch rightly views all past roads as leading to this dramatic one set-piece, like the Titanic and the iceberg. To that extent it has a touch of the genuinely tragic about it, albeit a tragedy in which it is hard to feel the remotest sympathy for any of the protagonists.

The whole truth of what happened, who incited whom, who paid whom, and how it somehow all ended with a Great Dane (Scott's dog) lying dead on a windy moor will never be fully known now. Thorpe's alleged co-conspirators were a tawdry and inept gang, the details of their plotting almost comical in their parochialism. For a so-called political Trial of the Century, it was solidly second-rate. The internecine trail of meetings, shady dealings and even shadier characters is carefully and clearly charted by Bloch, who at certain points one can almost sense holding his nose as he writes. Indeed, whatever his original opinion of Thorpe himself, I'd wager that the author emerged at the other end of this project with, shall we say, a more complex view.

What there can be little doubt about is the sheer loathsomeness of Scott, who from the first chance meeting with Thorpe back in the early Sixties contrived to remain an active and combustible threat to a politician with the national stage in his sights. A professional leech, he appears to have gone through life relying on the kindness of strangers who then, disturbed by his behaviour and obsessions, tried gradually to peel him away. Reduced to ranting about Thorpe in rural pubs to anybody unfortunate enough to be within earshot, he finally got his man.

Thorpe always denied that there'd been a homosexual relationship with Scott. As a teenager at the time of the scandal, I remember how little was asked of Thorpe by the media on the question of his sexuality; somehow his entanglement with Scott emerged as an aberration, a strange one-off in the life of an otherwise ordinarily married man. Where this book is most revealing, perhaps, is in the picture it paints Thorpe in his early days as an active and sometimes reckless gay man (homosexuality was still illegal) but whose ambition dictated that he took a wife. Apparently Thorpe, who cooperated fully with Bloch on this book, read it and declared that it could not be published while he was alive, showing that, not just politically, he was a man from a different age.