Among those he considered his intimates, he was unashamed about his tactics. ‘A new movement must find somebody or something to hate. In this case it should be the Jews.’ Only Mosley could have said this to Israel Sieff and then been surprised when Sieff asked him to leave the house. His brutal tactlessness amounted to a form of autism, and it is noticeable that the only people who thought him a decent chap who might one day save the nation were themselves semi-autistic individuals, press lords such as Rothermere and Beaverbrook and writers such as Wyndham Lewis and George Bernard Shaw. As late as 1968, the lugubrious Cecil King, Rothermere’s nephew and then boss of the Mirror Group, planned to install Mosley as the head of a military-backed government, with Mountbatten as his second choice.
For short-term tactical advantage, Mosley was ready to say anything. In 1927, he was mocking the British Fascists as ‘black-shirted buffoons, making a cheap imitation of ice-cream sellers’ – which went down a storm with the Independent Labour Party rank and file, who elected him to Labour’s NEC. As late as 1930, he was assuring businessmen that ‘you’ll never see in England people walking about in black shirts.’ The following year, in presenting the New Party as a centre party, he assured The Times that he had ‘no use for Fascism or anything else that comes from abroad’.
But only a year later again he was telling Bruce Lockhart that his new organization was to be ‘on the Hitler group system: members to wear grey shirts and flannel trousers. Storm troops: black shirts and grey bags.’ ‘You must be mad,’ Harold Macmillan told him when he heard the news. ‘Whenever the British feel strongly about anything, they wear grey flannel trousers and tweed jackets.’ Or that is what Supermac later said he said; he was rather anxious to make light of his own dabblings with the New Party.
The tendency to violence emerged quite early. When Mosley was returned as Labour MP at the Smethwick by-election in 1927, the campaign was described as one of the most unpleasant contests since the war: there was ‘an atmosphere of violence and unrestrained personalities who surround Mr Mosley’s political career’. When he was setting up the New Party, his first thought was to recruit stewards who were useful with ‘the good old English fist’, the ‘Biff Boys’, who were to be led by the England rugby star Peter Howard at a salary of £650 a year. Mosley declared at this point that there could be ‘no corporate state without a private army’ and openly referred to the New Party as ‘the British equivalent of the Nazi movement’. Howard, who later decamped to work for Beaverbrook and then to lead Moral Re-Armament, described Mosley as ‘the most vindictive hater of anyone I know’. When I met Mosley thirty years later, the light came into his eyes at the thought of his dear old Biff Boys. He was, I suspect, only truly happy when he was haranguing a brawling mob, with a few girlfriends in fur coats rushing for the exit.
Robert Skidelsky, in his 1975 biography, attempted to mitigate Mosley’s culpability by arguing that the violence was ‘at least as much the result of Anti-Fascist demonstrators interrupting meetings or attacking Fascists’. In the original edition, Skidelsky said that Jews themselves ‘must take a large share of the blame for what subsequently happened’, and that ‘a Jewish malaise of this time was to be obsessed by Fascism’. Dorril reminds us that, after strong protests, these remarks were toned down for the paperback edition, and Skidelsky later referred to ‘my unduly benign treatment of his later Fascist phase’.
But it is not clear that even now Skidelsky has really got the hang of what Mosley was up to. The whole point was to draw out the enemy; and he didn’t care how he managed it. Kay Fredericks, the Blackshirts’ in-house photographer, recalled Mosley telling him after the Olympia rally to fake some pictures to give the impression that it was the Blackshirts who had been attacked. From behind the Labour Party, Mosley said in January 1933, ‘will emerge the organised Communist, the man who knows what he wants; and if and when he ever comes out, we will be there in the streets with Fascist machine-guns to meet him.’ But because the Communists were too weak and few (Party membership was only six thousand at the time), the only hope of stirring up revolutionary violence on a large scale was to be flagrantly anti-Semitic, which could be guaranteed to provoke much more widespread opposition. It is thus not true that, as Skidelsky maintains, from 1932 to 1934 Mosley ‘regarded the Jewish issue as more of a liability than an asset, a diversion from his main task’. On the contrary, it was, as Dorril says, ‘not cynical political opportunism but a genuine, integral part of the movement’. Indeed, as the BUF shrivelled back into the East End (by 1936 nearly half its members were concentrated there), the anti-Semitic campaign was Mosley’s only hope.
And it failed. The failure of all fascist movements and parties in Britain from the 1920s to the present day has been abject. Mosley’s huge rallies never translated into votes. His commanding presence and by now resonant speaking voice might hypnotize, but they did not inspire trust. Though the violence provoked by Mosley’s activities shocked the remarkably peaceable Britain of the 1930s, that too had its limits, and no one died as a result, as far as I can tell. The Mosleyites never got a single MP elected or even a single local councillor. They were infinitely less successful than today’s BNP, who themselves are a fairly trivial menace. Even when standing for the New Party in 1931, as a glamorous ex-cabinet minister who had just resigned on a point of principle, Mosley finished bottom of the poll at Stoke. At the 1935 election, the BUF were so terrified of humiliation that they did not dare contest any seats but campaigned on the dismal slogan ‘Fascism Next Time’. In subsequent by-elections they usually scored only a few hundred votes. The Fascist candidate at Hythe in 1939, Kim Philby’s father Harry St John Philby, received only 578 votes. After the war, the Union Movement suffered much the same fate, campaigning largely against immigration. In his last contest, at Shoreditch in the 1966 general election, Mosley himself secured only 1127 votes (4.6 per cent). All seven nationalist candidates in this one-time BUF stronghold lost their deposits. As Dorril points out, ‘the BUF was among the weakest manifestations of Fascism in Europe.’
Dorril never loses sight of what matters. There are a few repetitions. We are told twice that the Duke of Windsor said: ‘Tom would have made a first-rate prime minister.’ (In exile outside Paris, the Windsors and the Mosleys dined together twice a week, either at the Windsors’ Moulin de la Tuilerie or at the Temple de la Gloire, a grand neoclassical villa whose name even Mosley saw the joke of.) And there are one or two errors, mostly when Dorril is hacking his way through the thickets of dim Fascist-leaning toffs. Unity Mitford’s second name was Valkyrie, not Swastika; Lord Portsmouth was formerly not Lord Sydenham, who was dead, but Lord Lymington, a ubiquitous figure in Fascist circles of the 1930s, whose English Mistery movement advocated selective breeding and unpasteurized milk and regarded the decline of the feudal system as the greatest misfortune to have befallen the English people. Dorril also confuses those two frightful Fascist moneybags, Lady Pearson and Viscountess Downe. Mosley’s headquarters, the Black House, cannot have been simultaneously in Chelsea and at 232 Battersea Park Road (in fact, it was next to the Duke of York’s Barracks, not the Duke of Wellington’s). There is also a little too much in the later chapters about the toing and froing of various undercover Fascist agents. This reflects Dorril’s special interest as a writer on the intelligence services, but the reader can motor through these passages without missing much.
The only serious complaint about this fine book is Dorril’s refusal to include proper notes. Dissatisfied readers are referred to his website, where it is difficult to pick up which reference belongs where, because the numbering system refers only to whole paragraphs. This might not be so bad if Dorril weren’t inclined to fragmentary, unattributed quotes where it’s impossible to tell who is speaking.
Martin Pugh’s much shorter book is virtually error-free, just as lucidly written as Dorril’s and just as pleasurable to read. It has, however, one whopping drawback: it proves, in abundant and often hilarious detail, the very opposite of the thes
is it sets out to prove. The introduction starts by describing what is regarded as ‘a comforting and widely held British view that Fascism is simply not part of our national story’. We are, he says, led to believe that
Fascism in interwar Britain was not just a failure, it was an inevitable failure. While it flourished in Italy and Germany, the British simply failed to see its relevance to them. In fact, Fascism seemed fundamentally alien to British political culture and traditions; the British people were too deeply committed to their long-standing parliament, to democracy and the rule of law to be attracted by the corporate state, and they found the violent methods employed by Continental Fascists offensive. Fascist organisations arrived late in Britain and when they did they were easily marginalised by the refusal of conventional right-wing politicians to have anything to do with them. When the Fascist movement under Sir Oswald Mosley showed itself in its true colours in 1934 the government took prompt and effective action to suppress the violence and the paramilitary organisation. The outbreak of war in 1939 promptly put an end to the movement.
Alas, by the end of the book that is pretty much what I do believe, and believe a good deal more fervently as a result of Pugh’s researches.
Fascism, he argues, was ‘much more central to British inter-war history than has traditionally been appreciated’. ‘Like other European countries, Britain had a pre-Fascist tradition, and consequently there is no reason, other than hindsight, for regarding Britain as inherently less likely to generate a Fascist movement after 1918 or for seeing British Fascism as a mere import from the Continent.’ But we have only to read Pugh to see just what this pre-Fascist tradition amounted to. There is Lord Lymington, of course, and Rotha Lintorn-Orman, the Girl Scout known as ‘Man-Woman’, who actually founded the British Fascists, and Valerie Arkell-Smith of the National Fascisti, a transvestite who spent many years masquerading as ‘Sir Victor Barker’, and the vet Arnold Leese, the author of A Treatise on the One-Humped Camel in Health and Disease, who dominated the Imperial Fascist League. Pugh rather half-heartedly adjures us to take these double-barrelled dolts seriously, but even he has to admit that the British Fascists never attracted a politician of the first rank to lead them. Nobody much wanted to join what Churchill called ‘the suicide club’.
Pugh points out that we can’t say that Mosley was bound to fail just because he did fail. Yet counterfactual hindsight can be just as pernicious as confirmatory hindsight. Yes, if one or two things had turned out differently, Mosley might have got closer to power, but to make any such thesis plausible you have to compare carefully the weight of the evidence of what actually happened against the weight of your counterfactuals.
We are told, for example, that if the Slump had gone on longer, voters might have turned in desperation to Mosley. This is the argument advanced by Skidelsky and indeed in later years by Mosley himself. But there was no sign of it in the worst years of the Depression. Mosley made virtually no headway in the areas worst hit by unemployment. What is much more likely is that people would have turned to the Labour Party. There were clear signs of this at the 1935 election, and Gallup’s early polls suggested that the 1940 election might have been a close-run thing had it not been cancelled.
Again, Pugh’s contention that a prolonged General Strike in 1926 could well have destroyed Baldwin’s government, and created the opportunity that Fascists were looking for, ignores the much more likely alternative that Baldwin would have been succeeded by a Labour government after a general election. Nor do I see how the crisis of 1931 could have brought Mosley to power, even if he had had a full-blown Fascist party ready for action. After all, his New Party was slaughtered at the polls that very year.
Pugh claims that the abdication crisis was Mosley’s best chance: ‘December 1936 was the closest Fascism came to obtaining a share of power in interwar Britain.’ How, precisely? If the King had attempted to dismiss Baldwin and appoint as prime minister Mosley or some other member of the ‘King’s Party’, the House of Commons would have erupted in fury and the King would have been dethroned in days. The King’s ‘sudden withdrawal’ was not, as Pugh argues, an unlucky contingency that snatched Mosley’s opportunity away. The King knew the rules, and he knew that the game was up. With each of Pugh’s counterfactuals, there is an absence of any mechanical device to trigger the required sequence of events. In any case, Mosley was, as his own henchman Peter Howard defiantly remarked, ‘the most unpopular person in England today’. When he was finally interned, Mass Observation took a poll and had never found such a high approval rating for anything. And when he was let out in November 1943, huge crowds marched to Trafalgar Square demanding that he be interned again.
While interned, he read Goethe, Winckelmann, Schiller, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle and Freud – which shows that the redemptive power of literature has its limits, because he emerged utterly unrepentant. He told the Sunday Pictorial that he had not changed his ideas one inch. ‘I do not retract anything that I have either said or stood for in the past.’ And he hadn’t. On launching the Union Movement at the end of 1947, he said that Jews would not be allowed to join and that a Fascist government would deport them from Britain. As for the Nazi concentration camps, the ruin brought about by our bombing was much to blame. ‘If you have typhus outbreaks, you are bound to have a situation where you have to use the gas ovens to get rid of the bodies.’ In his magpie way, he added to the old menu only his schemes for a united Europe and for worldwide apartheid. Indeed, it is doubtful whether he ever really shifted from the underlying programme on which he had been first elected in 1918, which he called ‘socialistic imperialism’: a mixture of state control, protection for British industry, imperial preference and immediate legislation ‘to prevent undesirable aliens from landing; and for the repatriation of those who are now resident in this country’.
The one thing that can be said for his later tactical adjustments was that he had the wit to pick up a smattering of Keynes, and to see the need for going off the gold standard, so the recovery could begin with devaluation and cheap money. But in the end the Old Gang realized that too, or were made to realize it, and in any case Mosley’s gut instincts in favour of protection joined him up with the very forces that helped to deepen and prolong the Depression. Besides, he did not really understand the policies he had espoused, because he still thought that the Depression would go on for ever and was taken aback by the evidence of economic recovery across the South and the Midlands through the 1930s, as the housing boom gained pace and the new industries – plastics, radio, cars – found their markets. His economic prescience was decidedly limited.
The mystery remains why the academic world has this incurable inclination to magnify Mosley, for Pugh is far from alone in the tenor of his researches. Skidelsky had at least the excuse of being the authorized biographer. He felt honour-bound to establish what sympathy he could with his subject and hunt out any redeeming feature. Besides, he was dealing face to face with a couple of accomplished liars, who managed to find the most charming ways of denying the death camps: ‘Darling, it was so much the kindest way,’ as Diana said to Nancy.
But why should this insistence on the fragility of British democracy persist in the face of such abundant evidence not only of Mosley’s nastiness, but also of his failure to inflict the slightest dent? Is it simply a desire to make our flesh creep, or is there lurking somewhere a sense of disappointment that the British electorate proved so damnably phlegmatic and preferred to potter along with Baldwin and Attlee? That if we had been ready to run greater risks, we might have achieved greater things? If so, it is not a disappointment I share.
ROY JENKINS: TRAINSPOTTING LOTHARIO
When out canvassing, Roy Jenkins always had a clicker in his pocket to keep a tally of the people he shook hands with or spoke to. He had been an obsessive list-maker ever since, as a boy, he used to go down to Pontypool Road station to note down the train numbers. He shared with Gladstone the habit of dividing his diary into qu
arter-hour segments. Are such compulsions peculiar to liberal statesmen, like Thomas Jefferson’s use of his primitive pedometer to record the remarkable distances he had walked? Perhaps political idealists feel some obscure need to nail down the minutiae of their existence in order to tether their cloudy ballons d’essai.
But Jenkins’s conquests were by no means all political and platonic. You would not expect to find it recorded in this marmoreal memorial volume – and it isn’t but Jenkins was that unusual combination, a trainspotter and a lothario. I mention his fondness for the company of women into his deepest old age only to colour up the bloodless collective profile here assembled by his fellow liberal worthies. Despite the editors’ instructions to avoid hagiography, the impression conveyed is of a somewhat bland personality – ‘agreeable’ and ‘civilized’ to use his most favoured epithets. What strikes me in retrospect was rather the immensity of Jenkins’s appetites – for statistics and public offices, for wine, women and gossip, for seeking out new places and new friends (and keeping old ones), above all for work.
After a serious heart-valve operation at the age of eighty, he knocked off 100,000 words of his Life of Churchill in a couple of months. Following his pigeon-waddle up and down the sandstone entries of Hyndland and Kelvinside or into the dining room at Brooks’s, you were conscious of his enormous unappeased energies, revealed by the curious opening and closing of his fists as he walked, like ratchets waiting to be connected to some larger cogs.
Among the prickly tribe of politicians his capacity for self-mockery stood out. He took genuine delight in Craig Brown’s parodies of his absurdly orotund public manner. He even professed pleasure when Tory wags founded a Roy Jenkins Appreciation Society to celebrate his foibles. ‘All first-rate politicians are figures of fun: better to be a figure of fun than not a personality at all,’ he would say. Like Curzon, his predecessor as chancellor of Oxford, he came to relish the legends of his own snobbery: for example, that when asked at Oxford where he came from, he had replied ‘the Marches’.
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