Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times
Peter Stanford
HarperCollins, £19.99, 365pp
Buy it at BOL

Before I read this extremely big book I knew only one thing about Bronwen Astor. Which is, rather fabulously, that when she was a model under the name of Bronwen Pugh, someone once described her as "that Welsh girl who slinks along the runway with a fur over her shoulder looking as though she's just killed it and is taking it home to her mate". Well, they say less is more, and this hefty effort makes a pretty good case for leaving the audience unsatisfied whenever possible, rather than risk hearing the bitter cry "Enough!"

Peter Stanford is a bit of an old God-botherer, to judge from his track record; his books include the dirty-sounding but intriguing The She-Pope, Catholics and Sex (bet that's a short one) and biographies of Lord Longford and Cardinal Hume. He's also a former editor of the Catholic Herald - whooah! Do we detect a common theme here? Did Astor, by any chance, convert to Catholicism after she received the nasty shock concerning her husband's association with the Profumo affair? Yes, on page 302. (Don't all rush at once.)

The puzzle is why anyone, even such a shameless promoter of Catholicism as Stanford, would wish to write such a book, let alone read it. True, the Profumo affair has a resonant and bitter beauty, even down to the culprit's name - I often wonder if it would have lived on in legend had the minister in question been called Bloggs, say, or Parsons. That the savagely working-class Christine Keeler (born in Staines, moved to Slough, brought up in a converted railway carriage in a gravel pit - it really is like that prolier-than-thou Monty Python sketch about being dragged up in a shoebox in the middle of the M1) could bring down the last government of Tory patricians - well, it makes Robin Cook's dopey bint and Portillo's fruit-salad days look a bit limp.

But of all the players, Bronwen Astor - wife of a friend of Stephen Ward, the society osteopath who introduced Keeler to Profumo at the Astors' country seat, Cliveden - would seem to be one of the least interesting. She didn't have the one-liners of cheeky cherub Mandy Rice-Davies ("He would, wouldn't he?"), the sphinx-like beauty of Keeler or the enigmatic glamour of Ward - Professor Higgins with whips and chains.

Barrister's daughter Bronwen Pugh was privately educated, then worked as a model in Paris in the late 1950s, becoming Balmain's muse. Of course ideals of beauty do change from decade to decade, but the best that can be said of the photographic evidence of her glory days is that line of Hedy Lamarr's: "Any girl can be glamorous; all you have to do is stand still and look stupid." By 1961 her looks were passé, and she stares out here from a Bailey "Faces of the 1960s" photo looking like nothing so much as an anxious chaperone.

There isn't a single photograph of Keeler, probably the most fascinating woman of her time; but what is a Madonna without a whore, especially for a Catholic? Consequently, references to her litter the book, counterpointing Bronwen's saintliness. The scared teenager who found herself singled out as a whore in the eyes of the media at a time when a promiscuous woman was generally considered to be something less than human is the recipient of very little Christian charity; she appears only as "lying", "luring" and "threatening".

There is an exquisite piece of pomposity on the part of Astor when she says, "Keeler used to call herself a model, and I think at the time some people, some of our friends even, didn't know the difference between a model and a model girl." I'm not surprised: they both lived by selling their beauty, after all, though Astor attracted a higher bidder for hers. Whether this makes her a "better" person rather than simply a more prudent one is hard to say.

Though Stanford makes much of the Cinderella aspect of Astor's story, it is difficult to feel sorry for, or get excited about, an upper-middle-class girl who makes the short jété up into the aristocracy when one considers the achievement of a girl from a gravel pit who brought down a government. Despite Stanford's best efforts to elevate her ("Bronwen has made me think, stretched me. I like that, her capacity to say startling things, her involvement in exploring the frontiers between body, mind and spirit"), Bronwen remains one of life's bit-players, unwisely tempted into a spotlight that does not become her. It is Christine - tricky, tragic, almost incredibly lovely Christine - who remains the one endless fascinator in this whole sorry affair.