What is little remembered is that she was a fox.

Beauty is only skin deep but ugly goes clear through to the bone:

Possible Nazi sympathies

The tarnishing of Lady Astor's image accelerated due to the rise of Nazism. Although Astor had criticized the Nazis for devaluing the position of women, she was also adamantly opposed to the idea of another World War. Several of her friends and associates, especially Lord Lothian (Philip Kerr), became heavily involved in the German appeasement policy; this group became known as the "Cliveden set". The term was first used in The Week, a newspaper that was run by reformist Claud Cockburn, but over time the allegations became more elaborate. The Cliveden set was seen variously as the prime mover for appeasement, or a society that secretly ran the nation, or even as a beachhead for Nazism in Britain. Astor was viewed by some as Hitler's woman in Britain, and some went so far as to claim that she had hypnotic powers.

Lady Astor also had a close friendship with Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., and the correspondence between them is reportedly filled with anti-Semitic language. As Edward Renehan notes:

As fiercely anti-Communist as they were anti-Semitic, Kennedy and Astor looked upon Adolf Hitler as a welcome solution to both of these "world problems" (Nancy's phrase).... Kennedy replied that he expected the "Jew media" in the United States to become a problem, that "Jewish pundits in New York and Los Angeles" were already making noises contrived to "set a match to the fuse of the world."

Lady Astor's actual connection to anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi policies is, however, debatable. Astor did occasionally meet with Nazi officials in keeping with Neville Chamberlain's policies, and it is true that she distrusted and disliked British Foreign Secretary (later Prime Minister) Anthony Eden, stating that the more she saw of him the "more certain" she was that he would "never be a Disraeli".[citation needed] She told one Nazi official, who later turned out to be working against Nazis from within, that she supported their re-armament, but she supported this policy because Germany was "surrounded by Catholics" in her opinion[citation needed]. She also told Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador who would later become the Foreign Minister of Germany, that Hitler looked too much like Charlie Chaplin to be taken seriously. These statements are the only documented incidents of Nazi sympathy directed to actual Nazis.

Lady Astor did not seem to be bothered by the fact that so many of her public statements caused difficulties. She became increasingly harsher in her anti-Catholic and anti-Communist sentiments. After passage of the Munich Agreement, she said that if the Czech refugees fleeing Nazi oppression were Communists, they should seek asylum with the Soviets instead of the British. Even supporters of appeasement felt that this was out of line, but Lord Lothian encouraged her attitudes. He railed against the pope for not supporting Hitler's annexation of Austria and his words influenced Lady Astor in many ways.