Last weekend, I was at Cliveden basking in the deflected glow of intellectual glamour, elegance and prestige; it’s not often I find myself drinking coffee next to Rachel Weisz.
Weisz – more used to red carpets than literary festivals – was talking to her childhood friend Emily Maitlis, in a session called Hollywood Meets Hard News. Ostensibly the talk was on A Very Royal Scandal, the TV drama about Maitlis’ scoop interview with Prince Andrew on his friendships with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and Emily’s resulting sudden traverse from TV News into Rachel’s world of film, and to plug her memoir Airhead. But really it was about lifelong friendship, as lived by these two divas of the small and silver screens: that’s Cliveden for you – it’s in a different league.
If you play word association games – as literary festival go-ers often do – then glamour doesn’t normally spring to mind: most are full of the middle-aged and middle-browed, specs slipping, listening intently – and in (slightly sweaty) tents – before wading through a sea of mud to shell out £25 per book. Mud however, despite this year’s intermittent tropical-style rainstorms, was not on the menu at Cliveden.
The festival is held in and around the Italianate 17th century villa–turned luxury hotel, originally built to entertain Charles II by his chum and fellow-roisterer, the 2nd Duke of Buckingham. No literary festival can escape tents – even Cliveden’s panelled and gilded Great Hall only holds about 150 – but, sponsored by Chanel and Conde Nast’s Tatler, the tents themselves, astride the palazzo’s gravelled forecourt, exude elegant festivity and are stuffed with the kind of guests to set drooling any salon-hosting eighteenth century Parisian Marquise. I wish I’d been present for any casual conversations between panellist Sir Alex Younger, former head of Mi6, and Daniel Craig, Weisz’s husband: perhaps the presence of James Bond and his real-world counterpart made another speaker, Sir Salman Rushdie, feel a little more secure. Mud is available, however, should you want it, in the surrounding National Trust-owned parkland, rolling down to the Thames below.
As well as Weisz, Younger, Maitlis and Rushdie, this year speakers ranged from Michael Gove, former cabinet minister and incoming editor of The Spectator, to Plum Sykes, the Duke of Beaufort and William Boyd, along with literary festival staples William Dalrymple and Robert Harris. But it’s the only literary festival I’ve ever been to where – as well as intellectually stimulated – you can feel slightly under-dressed, surrounded by beautiful, clever women in jeans – with touches of Chanel.
Cliveden’s surreal elegance is understandable when you know the festival’s origins: brainchild of former Tatler Editor, Catherine Ostler (author of the bestselling biography The Duchess Countess of about an 18th century glamour-puss) and the grandee historian Lord [Andrew] Roberts of Belgravia, the festival was born from a lunch in 2017.
“I was with Andrew Roberts and Natalie Livingstone,” said Ostler, of the Conde Nast writer Ostler had met while editing Tatler. “Natalie’s husband had just bought Cliveden and was refurbishing the hotel. It just came up – Cliveden has the most amazing history.”
For Cliveden, so beautiful, so close to London, so magnificently grand, has a track record of attracting equally gilded grandees: Winston Churchill was a frequent guest in the 20th century, when it was the home of Britain’s first female MP, Nancy Astor and her husband politician and newspaper proprietor, Lord Astor. Andrew Roberts gleefully pointed out while discussing The Power of the Crown: Monarchy’s Evolution from the Middle Ages with his fellow Royal biographer panellists – Anne Somerset (Queen Anne and Queen Victoria and her Prime Ministers), Robert Hardman (Charles III and Elizabeth II) and Helen Castor (The Eagle and the Hart and many other Plantagenets), that George III, subject of Andrew’s 2021 Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch, had slept in the bedroom above the Great Hall’s coffered ceiling. But, according to Ostler, it’s not just the rich and powerful who stayed there.
“Cliveden’s been associated with literature for centuries,” said Ostler. “Everyone from Jonathan Swift to George Bernard Shaw. And that main room, with the marvellous Sergeant picture of Nancy Astor is so atmospheric for talks. We suddenly realised it was the perfect place for a literary festival.”
The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore soon came on board: “We wanted a gender balance,” says Ostler. “Natalie has written two brilliant books about women and another about the Rothschilds. Andrew and Sebag are brilliant historians. Andrew has an amazing talent for biography and warfare. Sebag has written so much about Russia, the Middle East and the whole world.” Sebag’s wife, Santa, has also known King Charles III since her babyhood, adding extra glow to Cliveden’s aureole.
Of course, for anyone who was a sentient adult in the latter half of the 20th century, Cliveden is known for one thing alone: the notorious Profumo scandal of the early sixties. In Cliveden’s swimming pool, Defence Minister John Profumo cavorted (and the rest) with good time girls Mandy Rice Davies and Christine Keeler – who, unfortunately for Profumo was also sleeping with the Russian military attache. The Profumo Scandal not only brought down Macmillan’s government, it also signalled the end of the Age of Deference, when toffs and the powerful could (often) get away with (most) things.
The Profumo scandal, with its cocktail of gilded sin, has generated as many books, films, TV series, newspaper double spreads and documentaries as the Mitfords and Lord Lucan. So notorious was the scandal that in 2019, Andrew Lloyd Webber even brought out a musical, Stephen Ward, named for the “Society osteopath”, artist and Cliveden tenant who introduced Christine and Mandy to Cliveden’s swimming pool in the first place; Ward later died of an overdose of sleeping pills while on trial – as a result of the scandal – for living on the immoral earnings of women. Stephen Ward was not one of Lloyd Webber’s greatest hits, but that all adds piquancy to the destination – if you ask nicely, you can even see the swimming pool that brought the government down. Profumo himself, career in tatters, went on to devote his post-political life to good works in the East End.
For me, Cliveden can feel a little weird: the stage, as well as hosting people who I know only through their works, like Boyd, MacEwan and Tom Holland, is often full of my (more successful) literary contemporaries. I suppose, as a journalist, I always thought I’d be a successful writer. In fact, my success has come in other ways: I’ve stood on other stages, made films that have won prizes, wrote and produced a film that even got into Cannes; our refugee drama project, Trojan Women Project, is studied at universities like Cambridge and Harvard and I even stood for election as an MP back in July (didn’t win, unsurprisingly!). But…my 2008 novel about Sarajevo, The Girl in the Film, my cri de coeur, certainly wasn’t even long-listed for any prizes, despite respectable sales and reviews. And no literary festival I spoke at was as glamorous as this.
The glamour comes partly from the house itself and partly from the sponsors. Chanel came on board three years ago: “Chanel herself was a proper supporter of the arts and a great reader, as was Karl Lagerfield, so they have a rather amazing cultural programme,” said Ostler. “They run a wonderful salon for under 25’s on Saturday lunchtime.” Ostler is keen to point out, guests are not only those who can shell out over £200 for the tickets – “We’ve had a lot of people from the Tottenham Academy.”
Ostler – who I worked for at ES and Tatler for eight years so can personally vouch for her abilities at finding and keeping writers in order – says her journalism background comes in very useful: “Running a festival is just like editing, but in real time. But it’s also an ideas festival: we have plenty of people who have never written, like politicians.” She cites both Brian Coxes – the actor and the TV physicist. She was particularly excited this year to have not only Israeli journalist Ronan Bergman, highly critical of his homeland, whose conflicted views added great pathos to the panel on the future of the Middle East, but also Salman Rushdie.
“I have a real soft spot for novelists,” Ostler added, talking wistfully of a previous year’s fiction panel with Ian McEwan and William Boyd. “We had three or four Booker winners. I remember thinking it should be on Youtube, compulsory viewing for any English literature student in the country.”
It certainly worked for me: in the final talk on Sunday evening, I had a total breakthrough on the Lucrezia Borgia novel I’d been blocked on for year: Neil Jordan himself, director of The Crying Game and, crucially for me, the TV series The Borgias, helped me crack it open (although, now, I think about it, it might work better as a play). And I got to wear my (fake) Chanel jacket – rarely worn in my life as a refugee theatre producer – and fit right in.
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