Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism - book reviews

[Hakluyt]

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Black shirt, black heart

The wholly unflattering portrait Stephen Dorril paints of Sir Oswald Mosley in Blackshirt is richly deserved, says Tim Gardam

Tim Gardam
Sunday April 23, 2006


Observer
Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism
by Stephen Dorril
Viking £30, pp736

In old age, politicians are often surrounded by a haze of forgiving nostalgia. Even Oswald Mosley, at the end of his life, was allowed to be 'the lost leader', a man who might have been either a Conservative or Labour prime minister had his impetuosity not led him down a dark path to fascism. He was credited as the one politician who recognised the need for Keynesian economic intervention when, in the Depression, the political establishment failed. Like Lucifer, he still retained something of his original sheen.

Stephen Dorril sets out to strip away such sentimentality. He argues convincingly that there was always a self-deluding narcissism and pathological attraction to violence in his language and his actions, in both private and public life, that marked him out as dangerous and unstable.

From a wealthy but anachronistic squirearchy family, Mosley served in the Royal Flying Corps in the Great War. Wounded, he ended the war at the Ministry of Munitions, where his admiration for planning fuelled his belief in the corporate state. At 22, he was the youngest MP in the murky Lloyd George coalition government of 1919. Mosley was one of 'the Front generation'. Party loyalties had been broken apart and Mosley was elected as a Coalition Unionist, describing his policy as 'socialistic imperialism'.

Impatient with the inability of the Conservative-led coalition to mobilise a planned economy to deal with the slump, Mosley joined Labour. He had glamour; his Douglas Fairbanks looks made him a political celebrity. His vicious debating skills were formidable but, for all his charisma, he was deeply disliked. Beatrice Webb noted 'he is the most brilliant man in the Commons', but 'so much perfection argues rottenness somewhere'. Hugh Dalton wrote: 'Mosley stinks of money and insincerity.'

Young Tories still saw him as their radical new hope; Bob Boothby gushed over Mosley as 'the only one of my generation who is capable of translating into action any of the ideas in which I genuinely believe'. But it was the level-headed judgment of Stanley Baldwin that got to the point: 'He is a cad and a wrong'un and they will find it out.'

A magnetic street orator, Mosley had thrown himself into the General Strike and was a member of the 1929 Labour cabinet. Thwarted in his arguments for reflation and public works by the rigorous deflationary policies of the Chancellor, Snowden, Mosley fought an inspired campaign across the Labour movement, only to be defeated by the party machine. This was the last moment when he could realistically have made it to the top. Had he stayed, he might have become Labour leader when Ramsay MacDonald formed the National Government after the Wall Street crash.

Instead, Mosley had already stalked out on his road towards the wilderness to found his own New Party. The NP gathered around it some of the most interesting names of the Thirties - Reith, Keynes, Harold Nicolson, HG Wells, Bernard Shaw, Harold Macmillan and Nye Bevan all flirted with Mosley or joined him. But the party was wiped out in the 1931 election and Mosley, once leader, betrayed his true colours. He would allow 'no independence', Nicolson discovered, 'and claims an almost autocratic position'.

Dorril charts the parallel course of Mosley's sleazy private life alongside his shiny public career. He married Cimmie, daughter of Lord Curzon, the grandest of the Tory grandees. Cimmie's charm kept Mosley his friends when his arrogance would have lost them. She became a much-loved Labour MP and then followed her husband with masochistic devotion on his march through the New Party into the British Union of Fascists. In return, Mosley slept with two of her sisters. He was flagrantly promiscuous with the many members of the aristocracy who came his way. Dorril clinically anatomises the glittering, decadent and damned milieu of the last decade of British aristocratic power. When Cimmie died, Mosley was already having an affair with the 21-year-old Diana Mitford, who would stay loyal all his life.

Dorril takes us into the dark alleys of the shady aristocrats, disillusioned generals, renegade politicians, sadistic thugs and lost romantics who comprised British fascism. He demonstrates that the BUF never had any real popular following in Britain. At its height in 1934, there were 50,000 members, but Mosley's first rally at Olympia descended into brutal violence orchestrated by his Blackshirts. Recruits melted away. After that, the BUF never had more than 15,000 members, often as few as 5,000.

In a claustrophobic fantasy world of jealousies and uniforms, Mosley proved an inept manager. His danger lay in his allure to the British ruling elite. Rothermere's Daily Mail was an enthusiastic cheerleader for fascism in the hope that it would be the catalyst to a new right-wing Conservatism, but backed off when Mosley stood out as a separate political party. Edward VIII was also a fellow traveller and talked of Mosley as the sort of prime minister he would like to have. Mosley, however, failed to gather public support or capitalise on the abdication. The government remained nervous of him and he was barred from the BBC.

Dorril reveals that, almost from the start, Mosley was reliant on a flow of secret funds from Mussolini. It was only when Mussolini began to view him as a bad investment, so thin were the signs of any political headway, that Mosley turned towards Hitler. Whereas, at first, he had been ambiguous about the relevance of anti-semitism to British fascism, once German funds were essential to his survival, he had no compunction in resorting to the most vile anti-semitic propaganda. BUF publications stated that Jews were 'an obscene sub-human mass'. Even so, Goebbels did not rate Mosley as a serious politician. It was the vamping of Hitler and the Nazi high command by the adoring Diana Mitford and her sister, Unity, that provided Mosley with Nazi cash.

Throughout the phoney war, the BUF ran candidates in by-elections; they garnered just a few hundred votes. Mosley was interned when, with invasion imminent, he was justifiably singled out as the likely British quisling. After the war, Mosley kept up his self-delusion amid the tattered remnants of international fascism and sought to return to street politics by stirring up violence over immigration. But he was a relic. He last stood for parliament in Shoreditch in 1966, winning 1,127 votes.

Blackshirt is an unrelenting indictment. Unfortunately, too often the level of detail and intricate connection obscures what should be a chilling and compulsive narrative. None the less, Dorril has meticulously charted how Mosley's frenetic energy that in the 1920s had picked away at the economic theory and philosophy of the corporate state coarsened into the squalid mixture of fantasy, racial hatred and lust for thuggery that was British fascism. It is a book that rightly ensures that there can be no soft-focused rehabilitation.
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Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British fascism
Stephen Dorril Viking, 717pp, £30
ISBN 0670869996

Reviewed by Roy Hattersley
Monday 24th April 2006



Oswald Mosley is such a repul- sive and ridiculous figure, it is easy to forget that, for one brief moment in his otherwise deplorable life, he was right. Mention his name and what comes to mind is the anti-Semitism, the treachery that, despite his denials, could have made him Adolf Hitler's quisling in Great Britain, and the absurd mock-heroic uniform in which he led his pathetic imitations of storm troopers. However, in the months leading up to the slump of 1931, his prescription for economic re-covery was convincing enough to attract the support of Aneurin Bevan. Half the Labour Party of that time backed his ideas for reducing unemployment. When Mosley decided that his policy could be put into practice only through a new and independent movement, however, Bevan announced: "It's the Labour Party or nothing." Mosley did not understand. Loyalty was not in his nature.

The ideas that so attracted Bevan were a crude version of Keynesianism: deficit financing, cheap money and public works. They were advanced by Mosley - a recent convert from Conservatism who served as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the second Labour government - as a remedy for the crisis that led, eventually, to Ramsay MacDonald's apostasy and the creation of a national government. The frustration that Mosley felt at being overruled by Philip Snowden (the most orthodox of chancellors) and Jimmy Thomas (whose elevation from trade-union leader to cabinet minister had only increased his unjustified self-importance) is easy to understand. But as Stephen Dorril makes clear in Blackshirt, Mosley was motivated less by despair at the short-sightedness of his superiors than by a belief in his personal destiny and a rejection of the idea that democracy might stand in his way.

There were many other members of the party who were frustrated by the inactivity of MacDonald and the inflexibility of Snowden. Yet only Mosley wanted to destroy the movement that they led. His willingness to sacrifice all in the pursuit of his ideas was based on a psychology that was typically fascist - what Jennie Lee called "the unshakeable conviction that he was born to rule". Clement Attlee's question about Mosley's manner makes the same point even more eloquently: "Why does he always speak to us as though he were a feudal landlord abusing tenants who are in arrears with their rent?"

The adjective that colleagues and contemporaries - both the serious politicians such as Hugh Dalton and John Strachey, who supported his policies, and louche friends such as Sybil Colefax and "Fruity" Metcalfe, who shared his pleasures - used consistently to describe Mosley was "arrogant". There must also be a suspicion that he wasn't very bright. When he told Harold Macmillan that he was think- ing of putting his supporters into black shirts, the future prime minister replied: "You must be mad. Whenever the Brit- ish feel strongly about anything, they wear grey flannel trousers and tweed jackets." There is no reason to suppose that Mosley appreciated either the joke or its underlying truth.

Dorril illustrates, time and again, the madness of a man who believed that he had been called to save Britain from the Jewish conspiracy and the advance of international communism. When, aged 35, he launched the British Union of Fascists, his opening address concluded with the exhortation to his followers "to march with us in a great and hazardous adventure. We ask them to be prepared to sacrifice all . . . to dedicate their lives to building in this country a movement of the modern age." Such language might at least have fitted the occasion at a British version of a Nuremberg rally, but he was addressing a rabble of 32 social misfits and malcontents.

Mosley's fascist movement would never have achieved the notoriety it did, had it not been subsidised, from the start, by the fascist dictators. Dorril makes an important contribution to history by exposing the myth - assiduously propagated by Mosley apologists - that the BUF was too patriotic to accept the charity of Britain's enemies. In 1932, Benito Mussolini's foreign minister asked the Italian ambassa-dor in London "to get the above sum into Mosley's hands in whatever form you think best". Other sums followed. The total subvention amounted to £200,000 - nearly £7m at today's prices.

The connection with Hitler was closer but even more clandestine. In 1936, Mos-ley married Diana Guinness (née Mitford) at Joseph Goebbels's house in Berlin, with the Führer in attendance. Hitler himself ordered the marriage certificate to be hidden. If the close relationship became public, Goebbels explained, "Mosley would lose his prospect of manoeuvring with other politicians like Lloyd George."

Mosley nearly missed his own wedding. Had he been arrested during the Cable Street confrontation between his Blackshirts and the anti-fascists, he would have been in prison rather than in Berlin. As it was, he was just in time to complete a marriage which may have been a love match, but which was also a partnership in pathological anti-Semitism and a conspiracy to overthrow the lawful government and replace it with a puppet dictatorship subservient to Berlin. From the perspective of today, the comprehensive failure of this conspiracy makes it look farcical; but that does nothing to mitigate its wickedness.

Stephen Dorril's biography - comprehensive though it is - leaves one ques- tion unanswered. Why, once Mosley had turned from practical politician to fascist demagogue, did so many "distinguished" figures - Robert Boothby and Harold Nicolson among them - still tolerate his company? Between the wars, there were sections of society in which contempt for democracy was only just under the skin.

Roy Hattersley is working on a history of Britain between the wars

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Thuggery, buggery, hunger and war
Jad Adams on accounts of the rise and fall of British fascists from Stephen Dorril, David Faber and Nigel Farndale

Jad Adams
Saturday May 13, 2006

Guardian

Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism by Stephen Dorril. (717pp, Viking, £30)
Speaking for England by David Faber. (612pp, Free Press, £20)
Haw-Haw: The Tragedy of William and Margaret Joyce by Nigel Farndale. (374pp, Macmillan, £20)


"Mosley, Hitler, what are they for? Thuggery, buggery, hunger and war," chanted fascism's opponents in the 1930s. Rarely can a mere slogan have been so uncannily accurate. Stephen Dorril, in his new biography of Oswald Mosley, traces British fascism back to Guild Socialism mixed with imported notions of Friederich Nietzsche. This is all intellectually stimulating but surely wrong in the case of Mosley, who sought in Conservative then Labour then fascist organisations merely a vehicle for his own demonic ambitions.

Away with bloodless intellectuals? Mosley was always a conspiracy man, as demonstrated by his (comically misnamed) "Revolution by Reason" of 1925 where he spoke of "the obscure and secret working of the hidden bankers' hands". Dorril identifies this as the first public evidence of covert messages being passed to anti-semites, remarking that Mosley was tapping into a strain of anti-semitism in the Independent Labour party.

As Mosley's New Party transformed itself into the New Movement then the British Union of Fascists, "fascist ideology" foundered on such weighty issues as whether the paymaster was Mussolini or Hitler. As Dorril convincingly demonstrates, Mussolini criticised Nazi anti-semitism as it was giving fascism a bad name, so Mosley followed his tune in order to extract £60,000 a year from Italy.

Eventually, under Nazi influence, Mosley adopted a conspiracy theory bizarre even given the convoluted minds of the fascists: that rich Jews were urging working-class Jews to attack Blackshirts so they would retaliate violently and "non-Jewish opinion will be shocked" and reject the otherwise overwhelmingly attractive option of a fascist dictatorship under Mosley. The solution to this dilemma was to undermine Jews with anti-semitic propaganda. Simple.

Meanwhile British Union of Fascists branches, having attracted undesirables by the promise of violence, formed themselves into criminal gangs: Brixton's branch was organised as a brothel; Newcastle's secretary was convicted of burglary. These were the people to whom Mosley stretched out his arms and cried: "You are blood of my blood, spirit of my spirit!"

"Crikey, has the old man gone off his head?" muttered one bemused Blackshirt.

Everything around the leader was tawdry and mean, from the uniforms out of the dressing-up box (based on Mosley's fencing tunic) to the ersatz patriotism. Even the sex, which should at least be stimulating to read about, is all snatched moments of adultery and humiliating his wife in public.

Mosley cloaked sex in his usual grandiose self-deception, convinced that bedding the right woman would lead him to the dictatorship of Britain. As he said: "A deep mutual love of Spirit and mind as well as body can help to set the final seal of greatness on destiny." That might find its place in a list of worst chat-up lines, except that so often it seems to have worked.

Mosley slept with his step-mother and both his wife's sisters (including, latterly, Baba Metcalfe who thereby earned herself the soubriquet Baba Blackshirt). What stood for morality was that it was taboo to go to bed with unmarried girls as this spoiled them for the marriage market but "after they had had a legitimate child or two, [they] were free to play the game". His second wife Diana Guinness had the same attitude and insisted that she was not sexually jealous; "with sex, opportunity is so important" she said understandingly.

Dorril has amassed a huge amount of information from British, German and Italian sources, but there is so much detail in this book that I was often lost in it, and had to refer for orientation to Nigel Jones's excellent short biography of Mosley published in 2004. More egregiously, despite its length, there are no adequate references but a note that these are to be found on the author's website. This won't do: among the attractions of a book are that it is portable and you do not need a desk-full of equipment to read it. A book of half the length with an adequate reference section would be worth twice as much.

Length is also something of a problem with Speaking for England, David Faber's biography of the men of the Amery family, for it comes alive only when dealing with that bounder John, elder son of the wartime secretary of state for India. For John Amery, "speaking for England" meant broadcasting during the war that the German army was the only thing standing between Britain and communism, between civilisation and "world-domination by Jewry". His rabid anti-semitism was the more remarkable because his father Leo's mother, Elisabeth Leitner, was Jewish.

It was in Berlin that John Amery met William Joyce who, as Lord Haw-Haw, became the most famous war-time broadcaster and is the subject of Nigel Farndale's smoothly written composite biography of William and Margaret Joyce. The men were not friends. Joyce resented the preferential treatment given to the minister's son: "If I were a quarter yid like Amery, I should be rolling in luxury," he whined, in one of the more improbable complaints of war-time Berlin.

Unlike Amery, who saw the Nazis as a ticket to a free lunch, Joyce truly believed. He showed such slavish devotion to the cause that he stood to attention every time someone said "Heil Hitler", which in Berlin cafés was quite often, as it was the standard form of greeting.

He left Britain for Germany on the brink of war, accompanied by his wife Margaret, a girl from Carlisle who had pursued him from meeting to meeting. Under-aroused by life in the provinces, she sought political and sexual adventure. She found both in Berlin, where she broadcast as Lady Haw-Haw. Joyce would encourage Margaret to flirt with other men; she would taunt him, he would beat her and they would make up with sex. They used sheep imagery in their sex games, giving voice to "their private bleat" as Farndale puts it. Farndale's descriptions of life in Berlin at the end of the war are memorable, with the remaining citizens getting drunk, having sex, taking opium and spending all their money before the city fell.

In the end, Amery and Joyce were both captured and stood trial for their lives. Both used the same unsuccessful defence: Amery that he had been naturalised as a Spanish citizen and Joyce that he was an American who was naturalised as a German. Supposedly neither was therefore a traitor to Britain.

Faber remarks that a traitor from such a famous and well-connected family as the Amerys had to hang, or class-conscious Britain would be outraged. Such outrage had already been expressed with Mosley's release from imprisonment in 1943. He lived the rest of his life in various European countries, estranged from nationalist opinion at home because (unlike most post-war fascists) he believed in a European union which he saw as the ultimate fascist superstate. Some might be inclined to agree with him today.

· Jad Adams's biography of Kipling is published by Haus

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[Meursault]

What a load of shite. TNS and the Guardian just trot out the same list of insults everytime anyone less left-wing than Tony Benn is being discussed.

[Flint Steel]

Der Sturmitz.

[Charlie Robespierre]

Read this book a year or two ago. Has all the pedestrian mainstream prejudices. Strip out that and it does offer insight. Curious perspectives on Churchill's dalliances with leading a fascist movement, IIRC..