Josiffe was born in Sidcup, Kent, to Ena Dorothy Josiffe, and Albert Norman Josiffe her second husband, who abandoned his wife and child soon after Norman's birth. He later changed his surname to "Lianche-Josiffe" by amending his mother's maiden name, Lynch, and for a time called himself "the Hon Norman Lianche-Josiffe". When Jeremy Thorpe, MP, took him to stay with his mother, Ursula Thorpe, he introduced himself as "Peter Johnson". Josiffe was working as a groom for Brecht Van de Vater, at Kingham Stables in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, in 1961 when he met Thorpe, a friend of Vater. After leaving his job at Vater's stables, Josiffe suffered from mental illness and spent some time in a psychiatric hospital. On 8 November 1961, a week after discharging himself from the Ashurst clinic in Oxford, he went to the House of Commons to see Thorpe. He was penniless, homeless and, worse, had left Vater's employment without his National Insurance card which, at that time, was essential for obtaining regular work and access to social and unemployment benefits. Thorpe promised he would help. This was when the relationship between the two men was alleged to have started. Thorpe gave him the nickname "Bunnies" but always denied any physical element in the relationship. Josiffe's claims of mistreatment by Thorpe, however, led to his being reported to the police, in the course of which the relationship was revealed. The relationship allegedly led indirectly to the attempted murder of Josiffe, who was by then calling himself Norman Scott, in 1975. His attacker, Andrew Newton, was arrested after shooting Josiffe's dog, Rinka, but it was not until later that Josiffe's accusations against Thorpe became public. Although the Sexual Offences Act 1967 had decriminalised homosexual acts in most of the UK, and although Thorpe and three others were acquitted of conspiracy to murder at their 1979 trial, the resulting scandal lost Thorpe his popular support and he was forced to stand down as leader of the Liberal Party. Thorpe's biographer Michael Bloch described Josiffe as both a liar and a fantasist. He was portrayed by Ben Whishaw in the 2018 BBC miniseries A Very English Scandal, based on a 2016 book by John Preston; Scott remarked to The Irish News: "I'm portrayed as this poor, mincing, little gay person ... I also come across as a weakling and I've never been a weakling." The miniseries' director, Stephen Frears, has described Scott as "erratic", stating that his reactions to both book and television series are inconsistent.
Later life
On 13 May 1969, after his relationship with Thorpe, Josiffe married Angela Mary Susan Myers. The couple had a son. While living in Tal-y-Bont in north Wales, where he found casual work, Scott met Gwen Parry-Jones, a widow and an acquaintance of Liberal MP Emlyn Hooson, who interviewed Scott about his relationship with Thorpe but did not believe his version of events. After the break-up of their relationship, Parry-Jones died, probably of alcohol poisoning. Scott testified at Thorpe's trial in 1979, and afterwards retreated into obscurity. At the time of Thorpe's death in 2014, he was living in Ireland, but by the time of the 2018 dramatisation he had returned to the UK to live in Devon.
