Not A Happy Bunny

A very English black comedy about the fear and damage of public shaming brings out the best in Hugh Grant.

- Diana Wichtel

Class and sex and politics; rum dealings over a national insurance card; badgers: they really couldn’t have called this darkly comic BBC mini-series, in which truth is considerably stranger than fiction, anything other than A Very English Scandal.

The series rather gleefully recounts the shenanigans that led to the 1979 trial of MP and leader of the Liberal Party Jeremy Thorpe for conspiring to murder his ex-lover, stablehand and would-be model Norman Scott, or “Bunny”, as Thorpe called him. The case immortalised such tender promises from Thorpe to Scott, written audaciously on House of Commons notepaper, as “Bunnies can (and will) go to France.”

Bunnies didn’t, as it turns out, go to France and he caused all sorts of bother when the affair ended. If Thorpe had simply got his ex the wretched national insurance card that he needed to get work and move on, which had been lost along his troubled, itinerant way, there would have been no need for a mini-series. He didn’t, and it’s not really a spoiler alert to say a dog dies in the ensuing chaos.