“Cliveden is the only time of year I get bored of champagne,” the historian William Dalrymple belts at a panel talk about the Mughals and the Romanovs. It's 10am on Sunday morning. “There’s just so much of it,” he exclaims. We are at the world’s “most dignified” literary festival, per writer and founder of the School of Life, Alain de Botton. Set in the grounds of a five-star Relais & Châteaux hotel that was once home to a Prince of Wales and the Viscounts Astor – as well as, notoriously, the site of the Profumo affair – Cliveden Literary Festival has become a fixture of the social calendar on par with Ascot and Wimbledon.
It has been a tough year for others in the genre: in June, Hay, Edinburgh and Cheltenham (which takes place in two weeks’ time) were forced to sever ties with their sponsor, the asset management firm Baillie Gifford, following a divestment campaign led by Fossil Free Books. No such issues have befallen Cliveden, which is sponsored by Citibank and whose partners include Chanel, Tatler and the John Sandoe Bookshop in Chelsea. As such it is rather like that wafer-thin slice of society – the 0.001 percent – which sails through life unaffected by the travails of the populace. This is a festival that begins unironically with a panel on “Toff Lit”, involving such experts as Plum Sykes, Nicky Haslam and Henry Somerset, 12th Duke of Beaufort (nickname: Bunter). “Why are we so obsessed with the upper classes?” asks the festival’s Vice-Chairman, Catherine Ostler. She is interrupted by the sound of Haslam’s phone ringing. He picks it up. “It’s only Nadine Dorries.” He hangs up.
Cliveden is a sartorial and intellectual feast for the senses. A quick glance at my notes on Sunday evening suggests both ingredients are equally weighted. One page reads: “Plum Sykes has the best hair of anyone I’ve ever seen”, while another says: “Is the root of our failure in the Middle East that we keep looking for solutions that are military rather than political?” The scholars and puritans may frown: but why? As headline speaker Emily Maitlis proves in her bejewelled high heels and dangling gold earrings, one can be both bling and clever.
Not all is shiny, of course. Academics and ‘serious thinkers’ like Simon Sebag Montefiore (another one of the festival’s Vice-Chairmen) are here in white shirts and unfashionable trainers. Broadly speaking, though, it is a mix of men who look like they’ve just waltzed out of a Ralph Lauren catalogue and women who look like sterner versions of Sienna Miller. Daniel Craig is around, embracing his new Loewe look in purple aviators and sitting front row at every talk because his wife, the actress Rachel Weisz, has the headline slot on Sunday opposite Ms Maitlis, in a talk sexily titled Hard News Meets Hollywood (the two women actually met when they were three). Hamish Bowles, global editor-at-large for Vogue, cuts a smart figure in a green jacket, and the actress Ellie Bamber wears leopard-print heels and smokes cigarettes wrapped in purple papers. There is a man who looks like Charles Dance but is actually the former head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger. Cliveden is the literary festival for the ultimate insider: a place where the lines between literati and glitterati are blurred.
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The best thing about the bling and clever is they tend not to mince their words. Cliveden is sugar coating-proof: when asked by Michael Gove to summarise his view of former prime ministers, the former chairman of the Conservative party, Nadhim Zahawi, takes no prisoners. David Cameron is apparently "unapproachable", Liz Truss indecisive and Rishi Sunak is someone who does not value relationships. When Sykes describes Sunak’s suits as looking “too expensive” while he was PM, Haslam does not miss a beat. “I thought he looked like a waiter," he opines. Some are visibly upset by this: what would they make of his tea towels, I wonder. Out each Christmas, these enumerate things which the acid-tongued designer finds "common" – this year's will include “rescue dogs” and “discounts”, he reveals.
There are other, more heated moments. At a panel on the Middle East, one audience member stands up within five minutes to call out the speaker Ronen Bergman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from Israel who, the protester claims, has spent the past five minutes “boasting about bombing people”. (It is worth pointing out that Bergman is a fierce critic of his country’s government.) Several voices rise to hound out the dissenter. “Is there no one!” he cries. No one who... what? This comes a day after a talk between Ian McEwan and Sir Salman Rushdie's, during which McEwan laments our loss of “the art of disagreement”. Yet bar the odd fracas, Cliveden is impervious to the loutish aspects of modern debate. If anything, it shows that we can still have civilised dispute. Ideally, paired with a Chanel clutch.
The theme of free speech is always going to be front and centre of any event involving Sir Salman. The challenge is coming from both sides, the author says: totalitarian forces and “a bien-pensant willingness to entertain the suppression of voices that are deemed unpleasant”. One audience member is naive enough to ask if he would still have written The Satanic Verses – the 1989 novel that provoked Iran into issuing a Fatwa and culminated in an assassination attempt in New York in 2022 – if he’d known the “hassle” it would cause. Rushdie appears incandescent. “I am as proud of the Satanic Verses as I believe it’s possible for a writer to be,” he says. His advice to young authors is equally powerful. “Write about what you don’t know. If Kafka had written about what he knew he would have written about insurance.”
I wonder if Rushdie ever worries the myth of him has obscured his literary oeuvre. Despite publishing a memoir, Knife, to acclaim earlier this year, he is, more than a writer, a totem: of the modern canon, free expression, and now survival. The same is true of Maitlis, swapping roles with Weisz at their talk on Sunday: the former done up to the nines, flappy, thespian; the latter demure, dressed in black and contained. Maitlis has become a one-woman media event: the star of not one but two dramatizations of her infamous Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew, played by Gillian Anderson for Netflix and by Ruth Wilson for Amazon. The legend that surrounds her grows with every appearance she makes. There are whispers that the grey whippet she has brought is a decoy for her real dog, Moody.
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It all clicks when Sebag (described by one guest as resembling “a geography teacher who moonlights as an assassin”) makes a swipe at Radio 4 while talking about blood-hungry female rulers through history. “That argument [BBC 4] always makes,” he says mockingly, “that the world would be a more peaceful place if we were all led by women, like the prime minister of Finland…” Cliveden is, more than a festival, a sign of the times – of the totemisation of authors (sorry, icons) and the demise of vestigial news outlets that might have been synonymous with the festival fifteen years ago. Radio 4 and Newsnight have both been supplanted: by the Newsagents (Maitlis’ daily program, where she is free from the clutches of the BBC’s impartiality clause) and by Goalhanger, the biggest independent podcast producer in the UK, whose hosts William Dalrymple (Empire) and Tom Holland (The Rest is History) both have people lining down the driveway to hear them speak. (Holland, I learn, is creating an opera about Cleopatra which he plans to put on in Egypt.)
Media is changing. People no longer read Private Eye: but they do read Pop Bitch (“Long live gossip,” Haslam says). We tell our stories differently: more freely and informally. Two of my favourite quotes from the weekend come not from speakers but from passers-by: “Michael Gove is the original 365 party girl” – a Charli XCX reference, for readers over 40 – and “Jeeves was the demon twink from hell” (how’s that for literary analysis). The question, then, is about what is lost or gained by a more candid approach: and how does it change, perhaps improve, the way we discuss important matters such as the Middle East, AI, or even the opioid crisis.
There are two ways of doing Cliveden: stay at the house itself (if you’re lucky, minted and/or one of the speakers) or stay locally. You can, of course, just get a day ticket and drive to and from London within 12 hours, but you’d be missing out. There’s a party on the Saturday, which is technically invite only but which anyone in the right clothes can easily swan into. It’s not one to miss. From there, head out to dinner in nearby Cookham – Bel and the Dragon, a four-star hotel on the high street with bags of character, has an excellent restaurant. Order the half-chicken. It’s the right idea: more frugal. God knows you’ll be counting pennies after you’ve started on Laurent Perrier at 10am.
Cliveden Literary Festival is on in September.
Rooms at Bel and the Dragon start from £99 a night.
