I spent a weekend in late September at the Cliveden Literary Festival, at the famous (perhaps notorious) mansion in Berkshire which used to be owned by the Anglo-American Astor family. One little-noted aspect of the 1960s Profumo affair – in which the Cliveden party antics of showgirl Christine Keeler helped to bring down the Macmillan government – is how the scandal has detracted from the fiercely anti-Catholic politics of its Nazi-sympathising 1930s chatelaine Nancy Astor.
The first woman to take a seat as a British MP, Astor disliked Catholics almost as much as she disliked Jews, claiming that during the Second World War there was a Catholic plot to subvert the Foreign Office. She was renowned for telling the editor of the Observer, owned by her husband, not to hire Catholics as they would take it over, and that the “bishops would be there in a week”.
