For decades, the idea of the country house hotel – a uniquely British phenomenon – has held a seductive sway for those who would never dream, unlike Hyacinth Bucket’s sister Violet, of having their own mansion ‘with the Mercedes, swimming pool and room for a pony’. There is something wonderfully appealing about turning up at a vast estate that could double as a National Trust property, to be greeted by charming domestic staff who could have stepped out of Downton Abbey, and of abandoning all one’s worldly cares and concerns for a weekend of pampering and history alike.  

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Perhaps the apotheosis of the modern country house hotel in modern times has been Cliveden in Buckinghamshire, where none other than Meghan Markle chose to spend her last night of single life before her marriage to Prince Harry. Cliveden is, of course, a place associated with sex scandals – not least the Profumo affair – and while the fragrant Meghan is, of course, a woman entirely devoid of any such salacious dalliance, the PR that her stay there brought was better for the hotel than any number of thousand-word broadsheet articles laboriously dissecting precisely what happened between Profumo and Christine Keeler in the swimming pool, Spring Cottage, the billiard-room table etc.  

Yet just as Meghan’s standing in public life has somewhat declined since........

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