The Glamour Boys: the Secret Story of the Rebels who Fought for Britain to Defeat Hitler by Chris Bryant review

Labour MP Chris Bryant makes an extraordinary claim at the start of his new book. He asserts that without a small band of “queer” politicians – he uses the word queer to mean “gay, bisexual or somewhere in-between” – “we would never have gone to war with Hitler, Churchill would never have become prime minister and Nazism would never have been defeated”.

It’s an audacious opening to this fascinating story of 10 MPs whose sexuality, Bryant argues, caused them to be peculiarly alert to the threat that Nazism posed, as well as bold in their opposition to the government’s appeasement policy.  

All of these MPs were part of the rebel group sneeringly dubbed “the Glamour Boys” by Neville Chamberlain. Some of the central players are familiar names, such as Harold Nicolson and Philip Sassoon. But Bryant’s biggest achievement is in uncovering the stories of four almost forgotten men: Rob Bernays, Jack Macnamara, Ronnie Cartland and Victor Cazalet.  

It is key to Bryant’s argument that all of these men visited Germany in the early 1930s, and initially revelled in the sexual freedoms that Berlin offered. Even after Hitler became chancellor in 1933 it took time for the dangers to become clear.  

Jack Macnamara, elected Tory MP for Chelmsford in 1935, admired the Nazi dynamism he witnessed at the Nuremberg Rally of 1934. But on a subsequent trip to Germany in 1936 he was given an official tour of Dachau. “I have never seen human beings so cowed,” he wrote of the Jews and homosexuals he saw imprisoned there.

Rob Bernays, a journalist of Jewish descent who became Liberal MP for Bristol North in 1935, paid four visits to Germany in the early 1930s. During this time he interviewed several homosexuals of high rank in the Nazi regime, including Edmund Heines, the deputy leader of Hitler’s SA stormtroopers. Bernays was shocked by the brutal executions of Heines and his homosexual boss, Ernst Röhm, on the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, and henceforth became an active opponent of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy.  

The Tory MP Victor Cazalet had toured Dachau in 1933 and found “no undue misery” there. Alarm bells only started to ring when his friend Gottfried Von Cramm, the gay German tennis champion, was arrested and tried for “sex perversion” in March 1938. After a visit to Vienna the same year Cazalet warned in the Times of “the extermination of the European Jews”, and began to support the case for military opposition to German expansion.

Ronnie Cartland, who became Tory MP for King’s Norton in 1935, aged just 29, was the younger brother of the novelist Barbara Cartland. He was clever, handsome and described as “slightly flamboyant”. In summer 1935 he and Barbara took a holiday in Germany, where they were both horrified at the sight of anti-Jewish posters and gangs dressed in Hitler Youth uniforms.  From then on, Ronnie became an outspoken campaigner against appeasement. In August 1939 he made a passionate Commons speech in which he attacked Chamberlain’s dictatorial tendencies and failure to confront the Nazi threat. His courage was confirmed when he was killed defending the route to Dunkirk in 1940.

Bryant makes a good case for these men as outriders in the shifting opinion on the Nazi threat. But his argument that there would have been no war, no Churchill as PM, and no defeat of Hitler without them is less convincing. The factors in those outcomes are surely too many to justify such a claim.  

Another weakness in Bryant’s argument is the lack of detail about the sex lives of his main characters. He is too often reduced to implying relationships for which there is scant evidence. For example Ronnie Cartland and Viscount Knebworth are described as “inseparable”, while Bryant writes of Harold Nicolson’s relationships with Jack Macnamara and Guy Burgess that “he probably slept with both of them”.