THE GLAMOUR BOYS
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE REBELS WHO FOUGHT FOR BRITAIN TO DEFEAT HITLER
CHRIS BRYANT
Bloomsbury, 424pp, £25
In the 1930s the fear and loathing many of the British upper classes felt for Communism blinded them, until it was almost too late, to the nature of the Nazi beast. But there were some notable exceptions in Parliament, who are the subject of Chris Bryant’s lively, anecdotal group portrait. Suggestively disparaged as ‘the glamour boys’ by Neville Chamberlain’s sinister, toad-like consigliere, Sir Joseph Ball, many of these well-groomed – and wellconnected – insurgents either swung both ways, like Bob Boothby, or were incorrigible ‘pansies’, like Victor Cazalet, whose ‘double-breasted beige waistcoat’ was a giveaway.
What motivated these equivocal characters? Well, says Bryant, himself a prominent gay MP, they had skin in the game. Threatened by Britain’s draconian laws against homosexual practices, they instinctively identified with the Jews and other victims of Nazi oppression, who included the boys they’d slept with in Weimar Berlin, that ‘buggers paradise’ according to WH Auden.
In the Guardian, Simon Callow endorsed Bryant’s bold claim that without the Glamour Boys, ‘we would never have fought, let alone won, the Second World War’. But the Sunday
Telegraph’s Matthew Dennison raised an eyebrow at ‘so blunt an assessment’. While applauding their ‘grit, determination, bravery and resourcefulness’, he doubted whether Bryant’s subjects, four of whom died on active service, ‘would have made such a claim for themselves’.
The Times’s Robbie Millen thought Bryant was at his best ‘when he camps it up a little’ by taking us to gay haunts like the basement bar at the Ritz, known as the ‘Pink Sink’, which during the phoney war was full of exquisite officers exclaiming ‘My dear! My dear! My DEAR!’