Patriot Traitors: Roger Casement, John Amery and the real meaning of treason Adrian Weale Viking, 300pp, £20 ISBN 0670884987

For every 100 people who have heard of William Joyce, the notorious wartime traitor Lord Haw-Haw, very few have heard of John Amery. Yet these two were the only British traitors of the Second World War to be executed. William Joyce is offstage here, because essentially this is a book about the corruption of the British establishment, and about the parallels between John Amery and Roger Casement, a retired British consular official who was hanged for treason in 1916 for attempting to recruit a brigade of Irish prisoners of war to liberate Ireland after an eventual German victory. Both were marginal men from privileged backgrounds, and they suffered the same fate for their crimes.

Born in 1912, Amery's infancy was clouded by the Great War. He developed a severe personality disorder, and was given to contrariness while being sustained by illimitable self-confidence. At 15, he had a sports car, and was drinking, having regular sex and indulging in temper tantrums. A "moral defective", his petty crimes and instability grew. By the time he reached his mid- twenties, he was bankrupt. In desperation, he moved to the Continent and fell in with fascists and Francoists. His constant need for money eventually led to his joining the German war effort, just as Stalingrad became its turning point. Isolation worsened his natural misjudgement.

Amery and Joyce were broadcasters together in Berlin, but they argued over the nature of effective propaganda. (The late Francis Stuart, the maverick Irish novelist, was there with them but, disappointingly, he is not mentioned in this study.) Amery thought that berating the British public was counter-productive, but his own propaganda remained an abusive amalgam of imperial sentiment, fascism, anti-Semitism and "saving Europe".

He emulated Roger Casement in touring prisoner-of-war camps, trying to persuade soldiers of the Crown to defect. For Amery, the Jewish-Bolshevik enemy was a single category, yet his father (Leo Amery, privately Jewish) had helped to draft the pro-Zionist Balfour Declaration of 1917. The son's anti-Jewish ravings were perhaps a form of self-loathing, added to a confused resentment of his creditors.

The necessity (as he saw it) of collaboration was an anticipation of the cold war, but the British Free Corps was only a stunt in Germany's efforts to contrive a way out of its war on two fronts. Amery was too self-deceiving to realise that his propaganda was not what he did but the fact of his presence, a dissolute Englishman with a famous name (the Nazis kept him at the best hotels and took him around most of Europe).

Almost from the beginning, Amery assumed that Britain's war was lost. He subscribed, like his father, to the war aims of preserving the empire and containing communism. But Stalin's hordes, who had attacked the Poles in 1939, duly became British allies. As with Casement, there was no valid defence for what Amery did. At his trial in 1945, to spare his tormented family further pain, he pleaded guilty, although he knew that there would be only one legal outcome. After eight minutes in the dock, he was sentenced to death.

Adrian Weale has trawled different archives, but nearly three-quarters of the notes are sourced at the Public Records Office. Furthermore, the "select bibliography" is culpably scanty: important works such as Ronald Seth's Jackals of the Reich and M A Doherty's Nazi Wireless Propaganda are uncited. Weale's lack of contextual research is also shown in his suggestion that, by 1944, apart from his radio commentaries, Amery "remained otherwise unemployed". But at that time, he was preparing for a major anti-Jewish congress in Cracow, at which he was to have given a paper on "Jewish Influence in the English Ruling Stratum" (alongside Celine, Quisling, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and many others of the swastika'd culturati). Only military reversals caused the congress to be postponed, then cancelled.

Weale's central argument, that Casement and Amery had much in common, is not easily sustainable. The contrasts are as striking: one was a consular official whose African experiences provoked an anti-imperialism; the other, as a collaborator, never advocated (direct) military aggression against British soldiers. While there are worse forms of treason, theirs was enough in each case. Haw-Haw's death sentence was confirmed on grounds that remain contentious. One law lord dissented from his colleagues and held that an American-born Irishman who had lied to obtain a British passport could not be a British subject or a British traitor.

Few mourned or mourn these renegades. If Amery had somehow been excused because he was well connected - an extrajudicial consideration, naturally - it would have damaged morale at the Allies' victory. The law was meant to be above such favouritism. Had Amery not died at the end of a British rope, his significance would be less. But there remains more to be said of the pressures and contradictions of a strange life in extraordinary times.

Despite Amery's moral imbecility, he was neither mad nor bad, more of an opportunist than an ideologue. Casement was a fey idealist. Both men were dangerous in wartime.

Bernard McGinley's writings include a study of James Joyce, Joyce's Lives

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