Why you’re never more than 10ft from one of Sam Cam’s racy rellies
JUDGING by the pictures that emerged from her hen night this week featuring an outsize inflatable phallus, bride-to-be Victoria Hargreaves’s pre-wedding party at 10 Downing Street promises to be a very racy affair. Victoria is marrying Jake Astor, the party-loving younger son of Viscount Astor and the half-brother of Samantha Cameron, who is throwing open the doors of no 10 for a gathering of perhaps the most fascinating and well-connected family in the land. Jake, 33, who has never been allowed to forget Tatler’s description of him as ‘superhot Jake the Snake with alarmingly tight trousers’, and his fiancee will naturally be the centre of attention. But the presence of so many others bearing the beguiling Astor moniker means they will have their work cut out to remain above the fray.
Quite apart from their links to Sam Cam, the Prime Minister and the very heart of government, the family is embedded at every level of the modern beau monde — from the royals and the landowning classes, to Hollywood, rock ’n’ roll and, yes, the Middletons. There’s even an obligatory black sheep, but more of that later.
Indeed, such is the family’s ubiquity, it is often joked in smart circles that one is never more than ten feet from an Astor.
Trying to make sense of the Astor family tree is enough to bring tears to the eyes of the most forensic of genealogists. For the mere amateur it is like navigating a maze while wearing a blindfold. Even clan members tend to fall back on the all-encompassing term ‘cousin’ when it comes to describing who’s who in the family.
In little more than 100 years, the Astors have, confusingly, produced two distinct aristocratic lines and many have remarried several times. Suffice to say, the Astor name hums with posh scandal, fabulous houses and pots and pots of money.
NOTHING symbolises this collision of extreme wealth and disrepute more than Cliveden, the 19th- century Italianate pleasure palace that was the family’s ancestral home overlooking the Thames in Taplow, Buckinghamshire. In the Thirties when nancy Astor, Britain’s first woman MP, was its celebrated chatelaine, the mansion was synonymous with a smart-set of political and literary figures who supported the appeasement of Adolf Hitler.
Thirty years later, it was the location for the raffish party where the current Lord Astor’s father introduced War Minister Jack Profumo to a ravishing dark-haired beauty — naked but for a discreetly stationed towel — called Christine Keeler.
Their meeting and subsequent affair triggered one of the country’s greatest post-war political crises after it emerged that Keeler had also enjoyed a relationship with Soviet spy Yevgeny Ivanov.
The fallout from the Profumo affair, which scandalised the early Sixties Establishment, might have destroyed the Astor name and seen it shrink into the margins of aristocratic life. But Saucy: Victoria (right) and pals on her hen night with a blow-up toy (hidden for the sake of modesty by the Astor crest) instead it has flourished and its prestige continues to grow. Today, the Astors are Britain’s answer to the Kennedys. They spend summers at their estate on the Hebridean island of Jura — a cooler (much cooler) location than Hyannis Port, the Kennedy family compound in Massachusetts — and their tentacles of influence reach everywhere.
They supplied two bridesmaids at the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011, they are millionaire entrepreneurs and they are part of the media landscape. David Cameron, meanwhile, counts one of the two current Lord Astors as his stepfather-inlaw and another as a minister in the Ministry of Defence.
So just who are the Astors and where does their name and great fortune come from?
Here, RICHARD KAY examines a clan whose family motto — Ad Astra, or to the stars — could not be more appropriate for the number of brilliant marital unions that has helped to safeguard the longevity of the dynasty.