Peter Bessell

Peter Joseph Bessell (24 August 1921 – 27 November 1985) was a British Liberal Party politician, and Member of Parliament for Bodmin in Cornwall from 1964 to 1970.

He was educated at Lynwyd School, Bath, Somerset, and was a Methodist lay preacher from 1939 to 1970. He first stood for parliament as a Liberal in Torquay in both the 1955 general election, and the by-election there later that year.

At the 1959 general election, he was the Liberal candidate in the Bodmin constituency, but lost to the sitting Conservative MP Sir Douglas Marshall. He stood again at the 1964 general election, defeating Marshall with a majority of more than 3,000. He held the seat at the 1966 general election, despite a strong challenge from the Conservative John Gorst.

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 5th Avenue in New York and continued this business, both in London and New York, until early 1974 when the businesses collapsed and he moved to California. For most of the 1970s, Bessell was under threat of prosecution for fraud allegations relating to several of these companies although he was subsequently successful in reaching agreement with all his creditors. In order to appear at the 1979 Thorpe trial in London, Bessell was offered and acquired immunity from prosecution for previous debts, although he offered to waive this. For his last 15 years he lived, with his wife, by the beach on the Pacific coast of California where they ran a successful holiday let business.

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