More pomposity than perfidy

Branded as traitors, the 'Set' were just country-house bores

The Cliveden Set by Norman Rose (Jonathan Cape, £20, 277pp)

The Cliveden Set by Norman Rose (Jonathan Cape, £20, 277pp)

David Astor, one of two surviving sons of Nancy Astor, Cliveden's most famous châtelaine, is fond of remarking that his former family home is famous for two things, neither flattering and both largely mythical. The first was the part the house allegedly played as the scene of debauchery in the Profumo scandal of the 1960s; the other the suggestion that, in the 1930s, it was the base of the Cliveden Set, a highly-influential fifth column of Nazi-sympathising appeasers.

It is this second charge that Norman Rose, a Jerusalem-based scholar, unpicks with a series of interlocking biographical sketches of the major players: Nancy and her husband Waldorf, Philip Kerr, an adviser to Lloyd George, Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times, Bob Brand, a financier and public servant, and Lionel Curtis, founding spirit behind Chatham House. Apart from the Astors, the core group came together in pre-First World War South Africa as acolytes to Lord Milner, in charge of reconstruction after the Boer War. The young men, known as the "kinder", adored the racist Milner, and imbibed his vision of a strengthened empire as the guarantee of Britain's preeminent place.

The kinder regrouped in London around the magazine Round Table, and then in the 1930s dissected British policy to Germany over the Astor dining table. Rose is especially good on the world of political hostesses - Nancy, Maud Cunard, Sybil Colefax and Circe Londonderry - and the general belief that they had great influence.

Yet though Nancy attracted Baldwin, Chamberlain and Eden to her home, and introduced them to Round Tablers who urged an accommodation with Hitler's Germany, there is little evidence that the statesmen did anything other than listen. It may (in the case of Chamberlain in particular) have been music to their ears, but it was a position that they had arrived at for reasons other than a chat over the soufflé.

The Cliveden Set, Rose shows, was little more than a clever phrase invented by the radical journalist, Claud Cockburn, whose rants against the Astors in his scandal sheet, The Week, occasionally managed to coincide with political events and the public mood. A fortuitous combination of these three in December 1937 gave Cockburn a veneer of respectability. Soon the allegation was repeated everywhere. Nancy Astor, in particular, would never live it down - although she voted Chamberlain out of office in 1940.

Rose tells the political story well but there are structural problems with this book. Given that it is based on Cockburn's charge, it should have started with that, rather than spend 170 pages on the background. Moreover, Nancy aside, the rest are a dry, lifeless bunch who took themselves far too seriously and believed that the apex of human achievement was a fellowship at All Souls. Inevitably, Rose returns regularly for an infusion of life to Nancy, but she is a much-covered subject - and much bettered covered in other books.

The critical test, as every publisher will tell you when you embark on a work of non-fiction, is to judge whether a book's thesis could not be summed up in an article. Rose should have applied that test more diligently.

* Peter Stanford's biography of Bronwen Astor is published by HarperCollins