Allen Lane £20 pp488

Fellow travelling with totalitarian dictators is a fascinating subject, usually practised by historians who do not share the political sympathies of the travellers. Such literatures often reveal an authorial distaste for the social types involved. Stalin’s foreign admirers were wall-eyed intellectuals, tantalised by the violent engineering of utopia as they stalked the corridors of the London School of Economics. Worshippers of Mussolini or Hitler congregated in country houses, where plus fours sometimes went with love of the jackboot and nasty snobberies towards Jews.

Ian Kershaw introduces us to this stately-home set in his marvellous portrait of Lord Londonderry and appeasement. A descendant of the great foreign secretary Castlereagh, “Charley” Londonderry had many mansions. Londonderry House on Park Lane could hold 2,500 political partygoers without overtaxing the 44 servants. The 40-roomed Mount Stewart on Strangford Lough, with a private airfield at Newtownards, was useful to impress visiting dignitaries.

It was at Mount Stewart, alongside Castlereagh’s mementos of the 1815 Congress of Vienna, that Kershaw spotted a Meissen figurine of an SS stormtrooper. This jarring juxtaposition provided the stimulus for his absorbing, meticulously researched study of a key figure during appeasement. He scotches the notion that Londonderry was a Nazi sympathiser: “(He) had no truck with the fanatical Fascists, or the wide-eyed cranks and mystics who fell for Hitler lock, stock and barrel”. Even so, Londonderry did not care for Jews, although we learn that his Jewish sons-in-law met with kindness. As owner of coalfields in Co Durham, he was stridently anti-Bolshevik. Further references alert readers to the fact that his lordship was not the kind of guy who fits in Blair’s Britain.

After Eton and Sandhurst, Londonderry experienced the first world war as an officer in the “Blues”. Like many veterans of the Somme, he dreaded the prospect of another German war. Castlereagh’s ghost imposed an ancestral obligation to sort out war-torn Europe. As he lamented: “I sometimes feel rather shamefaced vis à vis my ancestors. I feel that they are murmuring: ‘Well, he might have done better than that.’ ”

His cousin, Winston Churchill, got him a first toehold in government; his wife’s skilful manipulation of a fawning Ramsay MacDonald secured him the post of secretary of state for air in the ill-starred National government. Londonderry was an avid supporter of the bomber. This enthusiasm made him widely unpopular, while his conviction that Britain should address Germany’s legitimate demands, even if this did not suit the French, alienated his cabinet colleagues.

Circumstances that Londonderry could not control led to his dismissal in 1935 when a sudden rise in German aircraft manu- facturing exposed his deficiencies as a minister, although he did set in motion designs for Hurricanes and Spitfires. Pique at the shabby treatment he received from Baldwin explains his susceptibility to compensatory foreign flattery. His arrogance accounts for his delusion that personal contacts with Nazi high command would succeed where the Foreign Office had failed.

The Nazi leaders feted Londonderry and his wife Edie. Kershaw writes amusingly about hunting expeditions with Göring and von Ribbentrop’s visits. “Swastikas over Ulster” was the local headline when the latter flew into Newtownards, the occasion for the gift of the macabre Meissen SS man. In 1936, von Ribbentrop visited Wynward Hall, Londonderry’s seat in Co Durham. At the service in the cathedral, the organ struck up the tune of Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken, Zion City of Our God. An alarmed Londonderry had to restrain his guest’s right arm from rising to salute “Heil Hitler”.

Despite being out of office, Londonderry persisted in his meddlesome diplomatic gambits with his friends in Germany. He continued to regard Hitler’s goal as being the reintegration of ethnic Germans, ignoring incontrovertible evidence that the German dictator sought a continental racial empire. The abomination of Reichskristallnacht passed without public utterance from him.

Londonderry thought the appeasing strategies of the Chamberlain government represented a belated recognition of his views. In reality, the government saw him as fatally compromised by his dalliances with the Germans. They might have sought to appease Hitler, but they drew the line at befriending him. Considering himself born to rule, Londonderry dismissed Chamberlain as “a second-class, parochially minded tradesman”. In what may have been a bigger blow, Göring stopped answering his letters, since even the Germans had ceased to see the point of him. When war broke out, malicious rumour had it that Londonderry was arrested as a spy and traitor. He died a bitter and sick man in 1949. Castlereagh quietly whirred in his grave.

Available at the Books First price of £16 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Why do Pynchon, Ballard and Wallace provoke such online loyalty?
• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
• What will we be reading this summer: the booksellers predict