Oswald Mosley – Fascism in Britain Documentary

Oswald Mosley – Fascism in Britain Documentary

The man known to history as Oswald Mosley was born  
on the 16th of November 1896 on 
Hill Street in Mayfair in London.
His father was Sir Oswald Mosley, fifth baronet 
Mosley. The baronetage had been introduced in  
Britain in the seventeenth century as a rank of 
minor nobility. The Mosleys were a lower-ranking  
scion of the British aristocracy with considerable 
financial independence. The Mosleys traced their  
lineage all the way back to the twelfth century 
and the early stages of Norman rule in England.  
Sir Oswald served for a time in the military 
during Oswald Jr’s youth, notably in Egypt,  
a British protectorate which had been effectively 
conquered in 1882 to secure Britain’s interest in  
the Suez Canal and the sea route it provided 
to British India. Young Oswald’s mother was  
Katharine Maud Edwards-Heathcote also a 
member of the British minor nobility with  
strong familial ties to the military. The family 
was also extremely wealthy, a near ancestor,  
Sir John Heathcote, having emerged as a 
major business figure in Staffordshire  
in the late eighteenth century in the early 
stages of the Industrial Revolution. Oswald  
was the first of Katharine and Oswald Sr’s 
three children. They had two further sons,  
Edward and John Arthur, born 
respectively in 1899 and 1901.
Oswald’s youth was troubled one in some 
significant ways. Though he clearly benefited from  
growing up as a member of a wealthy aristocratic 
family, his parents’ marriage was not a happy  
one and as the eldest of their three children he 
was inevitably front and centre in dealing with  
their marital problems. The conflicts between 
Oswald Sr. and Katharine usually focused on his  
adultery and over-bearing nature, bordering 
on physical aggression. Eventually Oswald’s  
parents separated in all-but name. Meanwhile 
Oswald Jr., who was known primarily to family  
members in his youth as Tom to distinguish 
him from his father and his grandfather,  
who also was called Oswald, was sent to live with 
his grandparents at Apedale Hall in Staffordshire,  
a large country estate. There he was apparently 
spoiled by his grandparents for several years  
before being sent to West Downs Preparatory 
School and then on to the Winchester College,  
an elite school which had been originally set up 
in the fourteenth century and which acted as a  
feeder college to Oxford University in a time when 
one’s class dictated their educational aspirations  
in Britain. At Winchester Mosley excelled 
in several sports, becoming both a boxer  
and a fencer. His proficiency in the latter was 
notable and had he been born in a different age  
and to a different social background he might 
well have ended up as a professional fencer.
When he was just sixteen Mosley left Winchester. 
Unlike others he didn’t head for Oxford,  
but rather for the Royal Military College at 
Sandhurst. In the nineteenth century the sons  
of the British royal family had begun serving 
in the British Royal Navy and armed forces and  
it soon became a well-established tradition 
that sons of the nobility should serve in the  
military or navy for some period of time in 
order to further the interests of Britain’s  
extensive empire. Following in this tradition 
Oswald arrived in Sandhurst in 1913. By that  
time he had already developed a reputation as 
having a quarrelsome personality, regularly  
getting drunk and picking fights when out and 
about Sandhurst. In the early summer of 1914,  
he was expelled from the Military College 
for his behaviour after he participated in  
a brawl in which he fractured his right ankle. 
Luckily for Mosley, within weeks Europe rapidly  
marched towards the First World War after the 
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand,  
the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 
in Sarajevo in late June. Due to this,  
he was accepted back into the military and was 
commissioned into the 16th the Queen’s Lancers,  
a cavalry unit, as British forces prepared 
to head to France where a large proportion of  
the most intense fighting would play out on 
the Western Front over the next four years.
Early in the war both sides had grasped the 
potential of aerial warfare. The first plane had  
only been successfully flown in late 1903 by the 
Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina,  
but immediately upon the outbreak of the conflict 
in the late summer of 1914 the British, French,  
Germans and others realised the potential of 
aircraft, first for flying reconnaissance missions  
and then as devices to break the military deadlock 
on the ground. Mosley quickly became interested in  
joining the incipient British Royal Flying Corps 
and began training as a pilot. His fleeting career  
in the air-force proved disastrous. He quickly 
completed his pilot’s training. Then in May 1915,  
while demonstrating his flying abilities in 
front of his mother at Shoreham, he crashed  
his plane. The impact shattered his right ankle 
which had only recently healed from the fracture  
caused during the riot that he was involved in at 
Sandhurst a year earlier. The double injury to his  
ankle exacerbated the wound and made it unlikely 
it would heal 100%. Then, to compound matters,  
he headed back to France to fight in the trenches 
before it was fully healed. After re-exacerbating  
the wound again he was informed that if he didn’t 
head back to England to convalesce there was a  
possibility of amputation. Mosley followed 
doctor’s orders when so informed in 1916,  
but his ankle never fully recovered and for the 
rest of his life he walked with a slight limp.
Mosley saw active service at the Battle of Loos on 
the Western Front in France in the autumn of 1915,  
where he passed out from the pain in his leg, but 
his return to England early the next year left him  
effectively confined to administrative duty at the 
Foreign Office and in the Ministry of Munitions  
for the rest of the First World War. Nevertheless, 
his eagerness to serve in France and the fact  
that it had left him with a permanent injury 
had gained him some respect in political and  
aristocratic circles. As the war came to an 
end he was consequently contacted by senior  
figures in the Conservative Party with an eye 
towards contesting the 1918 general election.  
He was duly elected for the constituency 
of Harrow, where he won easy election in  
an uncompetitive race. Thus, just weeks after 
turning 22, he entered the British parliament  
as its youngest member. He began to make his 
mark there based on his oratorical abilities,  
his speech-delivery being far better than 
most of the other members of the house. He  
served as the representative for Harrow for the 
next six years, gaining re-election in 1922.
These were also important years in Mosley’s 
personal life. In the late 1910s he began a  
relationship with Cynthia Blanche Curzon, a 
daughter of George Curzon, first Marquess of  
Kedleston and Earl Curzon. Curzon had served as 
Viceroy of British India between 1899 and 1905,  
as head of the burgeoning Air Board 
for a time during the war and finally  
emerged as Secretary of State for Foreign 
Affairs in 1919. He would become leader of  
the House of Lords in the mid-1920s and was 
both wealthy and powerful. He suspected Mosley  
wanted to marry his daughter for her wealth 
and social status, but he nevertheless gave  
the union his blessing and Oswald and Cynthia 
were married in May 1920. A daughter and a son,  
Vivien and Nicholas, followed in the first years 
of the marriage, and belatedly a third child,  
Michael, was born after a long gap in 1932. 
Other than this veneer of family stability,  
their marriage was a chaotic one in which Oswald 
unleashed chaos amongst the Curzons. He engaged  
in an affair with Cynthia’s younger sister 
Alexandra for a time and also Grace Curzon,  
Cynthia’s stepmother who had married Lord Curzon 
in 1917, his first wife, Cynthia’s mother,  
having died many years earlier. There were other 
affairs Mosley engaged in, but these ones with  
his wife’s sister and stepmother were clearly of 
a level of moral dubiousness that was unusual.
Despite the peculiar nature of their marriage, 
Cynthia and Oswald shared many similar political  
views and she appears to have even influenced him 
substantially in the 1920s. She was a supporter of  
the Labour movement and later in the 1920s 
even became a supporter of Leon Trotsky,  
the powerful member of the Soviet Union government 
who eventually fled from Russia after a power  
struggle with Joseph Stalin. Oswald too ended up 
drifting to the left politically in the 1920s.  
In 1922 he ‘crossed the floor’, a well-known 
euphemism for when someone changed political  
parties in the British parliament to join a 
rival party. Historically ‘crossing the floor’  
was associated with individuals moving between the 
Conservatives and the Liberals, the two dominant  
parties during the nineteenth century, but in the 
post-war period Labour had outflanked the Liberals  
to become the major rivals of the Conservatives. 
When Oswald absconded from the Conservatives in  
1922 he initially sat as an independent, but in 
1924 he eventually joined Labour. His principal  
motive in doing so was opposition to the manner in 
which the British government had handled the Irish  
War of Independence fought between 1919 and 1921, 
particularly the use of the notorious Black and  
Tan irregulars and the atrocities they committed 
against the civilian population in Ireland. More  
broadly, Mosley’s views on economic policy were 
drifting left of the Conservatives in the 1920s  
and Labour, at least for a time, seemed like 
a good home for his revised political stance.
Mosley’s decision to cross the floor led to a 
temporary hiatus in his political career. In  
October 1924 the first ever Labour government, a 
minority administration led by Ramsay MacDonald,  
collapsed after less than a year. In the 
election which was held at the end of  
October Mosley was put forward to run in 
the Ladywood constituency in Birmingham,  
something of a Chamberlain family stronghold 
that supported the Conservatives. Labour lost  
the wider election nationally by a large margin, 
primarily because the Liberal vote collapsed and  
transferred to the Conservatives, but in Ladywood 
Mosley came very close to unseating Chamberlain,  
a future British Prime Minister. In fact he 
may have actually done so. On the first count  
Chamberlain was apparently elected by just seven 
votes. Mosley understandably demanded a recount.  
On the second effort Mosley emerged as the 
victor by a margin of two votes. Eventually,  
on the final count, Chamberlain’s vote appeared 
to suddenly jump by nearly a hundred votes,  
and he won by a majority of 77. Mosley’s political 
career was briefly on hiatus, though he had given  
Chamberlain such a scare that in the next election 
he switched to the safer seat of Edgbaston.
With his parliamentary career temporarily at an 
end, Mosley and Cynthia went travelling. In the  
1920s they visited various parts of Europe and 
the British Empire, notably India where Cynthia  
had spent some of her earliest years when 
her father was viceroy there and where the  
Curzons were well-respected. There Mosley met 
with Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Indian  
independence movement. It is an indication of 
the contradictions which characterised Mosley  
that he could, despite displaying a clear 
streak of virulent Anti-Semitism and racism  
in other respects in later years, demonstrate his 
respect for Gandhi after meeting him in the 1920s,  
while the Indian political leader, for his 
part, also stated that Mosley had made a  
favourable impression on him. Meanwhile, as 
he was out of parliament in the mid-1920s,  
Mosley kept an eye on developments at 
Westminster and the Labour Party was anxious  
to have a skilled orator representing 
them again in parliament. Therefore,  
when the Smethwick seat in Staffordshire 
fell vacant in 1926, Mosley was an obvious  
candidate to stand in his mother’s native 
region. He won the campaign that December  
and so after a hiatus of two years returned 
to Westminster. Two years later he would also  
ascend to the minor nobility as he succeeded as 
sixth baronet Mosley on the death of his father.
Over the next several years Mosley steered his 
way towards a senior position within the Labour  
shadow cabinet while the Conservatives governed 
for nearly a five-year period following their  
earlier victory in the 1924 election. It was 
not until an election was held in May 1929,  
nicknamed the ‘Flapper Election’ owing to it 
being the first British election in which women  
in their twenties were allowed to vote, that the 
political situation changed. Although the Wall  
Street Crash would not occur for several months 
yet, the election was fought against a backdrop  
of some early economic warning signs and rising 
unemployment in Britain, factors which saw Labour  
make extensive gains over the Conservatives and 
returned MacDonald to 10 Downing Street as Prime  
Minister of a new minority government. Mosley had 
hoped for a senior cabinet appointment, but had  
to make do with the lesser position of Chancellor 
of the Duchy of Lancaster, an office which centres  
on administration of the royal estate. MacDonald 
did not wish to alienate a figure who he viewed  
as full of promise and whom many in political 
circles in the 1920s viewed as a potential leader  
of Labour and future Prime Minister. Hence, 
MacDonald gave him some unofficial duties in  
solving the unemployment problem, but Mosley was 
generally impeded in his efforts by more senior  
Labour Party stalwarts who had been involved 
in the party’s economic policy-formation for  
decades. As this occurred, his frustrations with 
his position in the Labour administration grew.
The events of the late 1920s and early 1930s 
were to determine the course of the rest of  
Mosley’s life. In the autumn of 1929, after 
a half decade of intense economic growth as  
Europe was rebuilt following the First World War 
and the civil wars that had followed through 1923,  
the economy in Europe and the Americas became so 
overheated that it resulted in the Wall Street  
Crash, one of the largest financial meltdowns in 
history. As is well known, the Great Depression  
followed, a period of economic decline and 
stagnation that saw tens of millions of people  
lose their jobs and a level of deprivation amongst 
the poor of countries like Britain, Germany and  
the United States that is without equal in modern 
times. The Great Depression also led to massive  
political fluctuations in Europe and the western 
hemisphere that led to the collapse of centrist  
governments. From 1930 onwards political 
extremes on the left and right were once  
again in vogue. For Mosley the crisis of the Great 
Depression led to him once again reconsidering his  
political stances as he came to conclude that 
the Labour Party did not have the ability or  
the ideas to meet the economic crisis head on. 
Having flirted with the Conservatives in years  
gone by and now the Labour movement, he would 
from 1930 onwards hew his own political path.
The first major sign of Mosley’s increasingly 
independent streak was seen in 1930 when he  
drew up and released what is now known as the 
Mosley Memorandum. The Memorandum was Mosley’s  
blueprint for how Britain could pull itself out 
of the Great Depression. In it he called for the  
implementation of high tariffs on imports of goods 
from other European countries in order to protect  
British industry and commerce in the midst of the 
crisis, a measure which he believed would increase  
employment at home. Where goods had to come into 
Britain from abroad he proposed that they should  
be sourced from parts of the British Empire 
rather than obtained from the United States,  
Germany, France or other competitors. He also 
called for the nationalisation of certain  
British industries, a radical overhaul of 
the educational system to ensure British  
men and women stayed in education for longer 
and more people went on to higher education,  
while other features of the memorandum aimed 
towards reducing the highly class-based nature  
of British society. Effectively what Mosley 
was aiming towards was a state-led version  
of a knowledge economy where the aim was to 
create a broad and dynamic middle class. While  
Mosley is a very controversial figure today, 
there is no denying the fact that there were  
attractive elements to the Memorandum and it 
was widely praised at the time by economists,  
including John Maynard Keynes, the most 
important economist of the first half of  
the twentieth century. Over half a century later 
policy analysts in the British Conservative Party  
reconsidered it as a means of responding to 
the economic downturn of the early 1990s.
As much as the Memorandum was praised by figures 
like Keynes at the time, it was clear to Mosley  
that it would not be accepted as the basis of 
the Labour Party’s economic policy. He quickly  
decided to split with the party. However, unlike 
Winston Churchill, whose family was somewhat close  
to the Mosleys and who had once crossed the 
floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals  
only to come back again to the Conservatives in 
the 1920s, Mosley would not return to the Tories,  
nor would he join the Liberals, which were a 
rapidly declining force in British politics  
once support for the Labour Party expanded in 
the 1920s. Instead, Mosley formed his own party,  
calling it the New Party. Formally established 
in the spring of 1931, it immediately emerged as  
a minor parliamentary group as Mosley convinced 
half a dozen fellow Labour MPs to join him. Its  
main policy platform was the Mosley Memorandum. 
Ultimately the New Party lasted for only year for  
in 1932 Mosley formed a new organisation and 
amalgamated the New Party into it. He called  
it the British Union of Fascists. Meanwhile, the 
New Party lost its parliamentary representation  
quickly as its main figures, including Mosley, 
lost their seats in the 1931 general election.
It is worth pausing in our story to consider the 
politics of Europe in the 1930s. The economic  
and social crisis wrought by the Great Depression, 
combined with the fears of a communist takeover of  
much of Europe following the establishment of the 
Soviet Union near the end of the First World War,  
had created a general desire for a new form of 
politics in Europe, one which combined elements  
of radical nationalism and also elements 
of socialism. This curious mix of left and  
right wing politics is typically identified as 
fascism today and is associated with extreme  
racial views, but contemporaries would have 
understood it more as a form of corporatism,  
the idea that the citizens of a country would be 
unified in a corporate manner in furthering and  
advancing their nation’s cause in a way which 
was both nationalistic but also socialistic in  
the sense that the wellbeing of the middle and 
lower classes was to be favoured as much as the  
upper classes. While it has enormously sinister 
overtones today as a result of the barbaric  
racial elements which were incorporated into 
this fascist politics, when Mosley established  
the British Union of Fascists in 1932 those same 
negative overtones did not yet exist. Moreover,  
what he was doing was entirely in keeping with the 
general drift of politics in the western world at  
that time. Nearly every country in Central Europe 
adopted some form of fascism or corporatism in the  
mid-1930s, so did Portugal and Spain, and even 
in countries where corporatist parties did not  
rise to power such as in Ireland, there were 
still quasi-fascist movements during the 1930s  
that had major links to the political 
establishment. As such, what Mosley was  
doing in the early-to-mid-1930s, 
needs to be viewed in context.
The period when Mosley was establishing the New 
Party and then the British Union of Fascists in  
1931 and 1932 were also years of continuing 
infidelity in his marriage. The new object of  
his affections in the early 1930s was Diana 
Guinness, a scion of the Mitford family, a  
British aristocratic family that could trace their 
lineage all the way back to the Norman Conquest in  
the eleventh century. Diana was married to Bryan 
Guinness, a member of the wealthy Anglo-Irish  
brewing dynasty, and as with Oswald, she had 
children from her first marriage. Nevertheless,  
she divorced her husband in 1932 and her affair 
with Oswald became more and more serious over  
time. For his part he had repeatedly 
asserted his intention to leave Cynthia,  
though one suspects he might never have done so 
had fate not intervened in 1933 as Cynthia died  
at just 34 years of age from complications of 
peritonitis which in turn had emerged following  
an operation for appendicitis. With this, Oswald 
and Diana were able to pursue their relationship  
more openly and they soon emerged as the most 
prominent couple in the world of British fascism,  
with Diana espousing the political movement 
faithfully, having come from a family which  
was keenly divided between adherents of 
fascism and socialism. It was not until  
1936 that Oswald and Diana eventually married. 
They would have two sons, Alexander and Max.
The British Union of Fascists had mixed success 
in the 1930s. Its membership grew to over 50,000  
people and it began to acquire support from 
elements of the established British media such as  
the Daily Mail newspaper which once ran a headline 
proclaiming, quote, “Hurray for the Blackshirts!”  
in reference to the blackshirt uniform which 
Mosley had the members of the BUF adopt. It found  
particular success in certain parts of London and 
other urban centres where unemployment was high  
as a result of the Great Depression and there was 
growing anti-migration sentiment. However, it met  
with very little electoral success, not contesting 
the 1935 general election and holding no more than  
a few seats on local councils at various points in 
the 1930s. This is how things stood for the most  
part throughout the decade. But while the BUF 
did not have any real parliamentary presence,  
they were still a factor in British political life 
that could not be avoided, with their distinctive  
uniforms, their rallies and Mosley’s oratory. 
Even those who reviled the BUF politically had to  
admit that Oswald was perhaps the most effective 
political speaker in the country during the 1930s.
If the BUF met with little electoral success 
in the 1930s this was perhaps largely owing  
to concerns about the party’s connections to 
European fascism and in particular with Nazi  
Germany. The Nazis under Adolf Hitler had 
come to power there in 1933. Much of their  
rhetoric centred on reviving Germany after the 
humiliation of the First World War and the Treaty  
of Versailles that had been imposed on Germany in 
1919. With their talk of Germany’s re-emergence as  
the greatest power on the continent, many in 
Britain were uneasy about this new political  
experiment being orchestrated from Berlin and 
what implications it might have for Britain and  
for peace in Europe. Despite the general unease 
with Hitler, Mosley positively cozied up to the  
Nazis. When he and Diana were married in 1936 the 
ceremony was carried out in Germany at the home of  
the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. 
Mosley was also a great admirer of the Italian  
fascist leader, Benito Mussolini. In 1937 he began 
an initiative to establish a pro-German radio  
station broadcasting from the Channel Islands. 
It was all enough to give many in Britain pause  
as to where Mosley’s political loyalties 
lay and what his motives were with the BUF.
Hand in hand with his growing ties to the 
fascist movements on the continent was an  
adoption of an increasingly xenophobic and 
antisemitic stance by Mosley and the BUF,  
particularly towards the Jewish community in 
Britain. There was also a more virulent form  
of anti-migration rhetoric in Mosley’s 
political statements towards groups such  
as the Irish and the peoples of the British 
Empire in regions like India and South Africa,  
a development which points towards a fundamental 
shift in his own political views from the more  
tolerant figure of the 1920s. All of this came to 
a head on the 4th of October 1936 in the Battle of  
Cable Street in the East End of London. That 
day a march was held by Mosley and the BUF,  
one which would involve separate divisions of 
the Blackshirts and their supporters proceeding  
from the Tower of London to Bethnal Green and 
Shoreditch where speeches would be made by Mosley  
and others. In response, a separate counter-march 
was organised by a coalition of anti-fascists  
including the British communists, trade unionists 
and groups representing both the Jewish and Irish  
communities in London. Barricades were also 
erected by those opposed to Mosley’s event,  
primarily on Cable Street to impede their march, 
thus the name ‘The Battle of Cable Street’. The  
Metropolitan Police managed to prevent the 
event from boiling over into major violence,  
with well over a hundred people arrested. 
Overall, it demonstrated the growing racism  
of the BUF movement, but also the determination 
of many different groups in London to unite to  
oppose them. A petition to try to prevent 
the march garnered over 100,000 signatures  
and the government moved afterwards to pass 
the Public Order Act of 1936 which prohibited  
large gatherings in which paramilitary uniforms 
like those of the Blackshirts would be worn.
The late 1930s were an increasingly fractious 
period in the history of the BUF. On the  
continent, Germany was rapidly rearming in a 
breach of the terms of The Treaty of Versailles,  
while in the spring of 1938 it violated another 
major tenet of the peace treaty of 1919 by  
entering a political union with Austria to create 
a ‘Greater Germany’. No sooner was this undertaken  
than Hitler began pressing Britain, France and 
Italy to be allowed to annex the Sudetenland,  
a region of Czechoslovakia where a majority 
of people spoke German and identified as being  
ethnically German. Eventually the British and 
French caved to pressure from Hitler at the Munich  
Conference of September 1938, but warned that any 
further acts of aggressive expansion would lead to  
war. As these events played out, Mosley and the 
BUF became ever more controversial in England.  
At a rally in Liverpool late in 1937 members of 
the public pelted Mosley with rocks after he gave  
a fascist salute to the crowd. Yet he continued 
to have a loyal following. At the Britain First  
rally held at Earl’s Court Exhibition Hall on 
the 16th of July 1939, 30,000 people attended  
the largest indoor political rally in British 
history. There Mosley enflamed the crowd with  
talk of how a Jewish conspiracy was leading 
Britain to war with countries that should be  
its natural allies and that the coming general 
election, which was due to be held in 1940,  
would be bought and sold by Jewish financiers and 
those who controlled the media. It was a clear  
manifestation of the degree to which Mosley had 
adopted the ideological beliefs of German Nazism.
Even as Mosley was presenting his conspiracy-laden 
and antisemitic speech to his loyal base of  
followers at Earl’s Court, Europe was plunging 
into war. In March 1939 Hitler and the Nazis  
abandoned the promises made at Munich the previous 
autumn and annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia,  
with the city of Memel stripped from Lithuania 
at the same time. Their attention then turned  
to Poland. The Nazis began an aggressive 
campaign to convince Europe of Germany’s  
rights to Polish territory. In August 1939, 
just weeks after Mosley’s Britain First rally,  
a non-aggression pact was signed between Germany 
and its ideological enemy, the Soviet Union,  
paving the way for the Nazis to invade Poland on 
the 1st of September after a false flag operation.  
As German tanks rolled over the eastern border, 
London and Paris declared war on Berlin. The  
Second World War remained a largely European 
affair for months thereafter, with little  
major action. The Germans and Russians quickly 
overran Poland and carved it up between them,  
but little occurred in the winter of 1939 and 
the spring of 1940, so much so that some began  
to call the war a phoney war. It wasn’t until 
the late spring that the next steps were taken  
when Denmark and Norway were quickly occupied 
by the Germans and then the German Wehrmacht  
began massing on the western border for 
the long awaited invasion of France.
In Britain, Mosley’s position was utterly 
compromised by these events. As the leader  
of the British fascist movement and as someone 
who had made no secret of his ties to the regime  
in Berlin he was now viewed as the leader of a 
potential fifth column, a British equivalent of  
Vidkun Quisling, the former Norwegian former 
minister of defence who had formed a fascist  
party there in 1933, the Nasjonal Samling or 
‘National Gathering’. Quisling had facilitated  
the Nazi occupation of Norway in April 1940 and 
later became the head of Nazi Norway. Mosley  
was perceived as a potential British version of 
Quisling. Yet there was also the possibility that  
he might be useful for the British government. 
There was no shortage of individuals in late 1939  
and into 1940 in Britain, many within government 
circles, that believed Britain would be better  
off reaching an arrangement with Hitler and the 
Nazis and combining against the Soviet Union  
and other radical movements on the far left of 
the political spectrum. In calling throughout  
the first months of the war for a negotiated 
peace Mosley was positioning himself as someone  
who could negotiate with Berlin on Britain’s 
behalf if the tide swung in favour of peace.
Whatever ambitions Mosley might have held to 
become the architect of peace were scuttled  
in just a few weeks in May 1940. Early that 
month, in response to a growing crisis over  
the wartime leadership of Mosley’s old rival from 
the 1924 general election, Prime Minister Neville  
Chamberlain, was forced to step down as Prime 
Minister. He was succeeded by Winston Churchill,  
a figure who had consistently warned about the 
threat posed by the Nazis during the 1930s and  
who was committed to war with Germany. With 
this Mosley hopes of negotiating peace terms  
ended. Moreover, the same day that Churchill 
took office, the 10th of May 1940, German army  
divisions invaded neutral Belgium and then headed 
into north-eastern France. The campaign which  
followed was a disaster for the French and the 
British Expeditionary Force, the latter of which  
only narrowly avoided complete destruction at 
Dunkirk. With the fall of France and a potential  
German invasion of Britain on the horizon, the 
British government moved to secure its position  
domestically. In late May, Mosley was arrested 
and interned under Defence Regulation 18B. This  
emergency legislation had been passed in September 
1939 at the beginning of the war to allow for the  
arrest and detention of suspected enemies of the 
state during wartime without charge or trial. It  
was primarily utilised in the years that followed 
against the British Union of Fascists and members  
of the Irish nationalist movement in Northern 
Ireland who were opposed to the partition of  
the island back in 1921. Mosley would be 
held for three years under Regulation 18B.
The terms of Mosley’s internment during the 
Second World War were not as onerous as they  
might have been, in considerable part owing 
to the intervention of the Prime Minister.  
Although their political views had diverged 
enormously during the 1930s to occupy the  
polar opposites of the political spectrum in 
Britain, Churchill had admired Mosley back in  
the 1920s and viewed him as a figure of great 
potential. In 1940, he arranged for Mosley to  
be held under favourable conditions at Royal 
Holloway Prison. His wife Diana was detained  
as well in the summer of 1940 after giving birth 
to their son Max. She was allowed to join Oswald,  
apparently due to the direct intervention of 
Churchill. The reasons for this lay with the  
tangled paternity of Churchill’s wife Clementine. 
Clementine’s mother Blanche had been known for her  
infidelity during her lifetime and it was widely 
suspected that Clementine’s father was actually  
Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, Diana Mosley’s 
grandfather. Diana’s family apparently appealed  
to Clementine and Churchill in 1940 to ensure 
that Diana and Oswald were interned together.  
Meanwhile, their children from their first 
marriages and their marriage to one another  
were looked after by several different family 
members during their period of detention.
Oswald spent three years in prison. He and 
Diana were not charged, for though they had  
come under very reasonable suspicion as 
the leading figures of British fascism,  
they were not technically guilty of having 
committed any crime. By 1943 their detention  
had become something of a cause celebre in 
British politics. This was related to the  
changing circumstances of the war. While Mosley 
had been arrested in the direst days in 1940  
as France was about to fall and the Battle of 
Britain lay ahead, the nature of the conflict  
had altered dramatically from late 1941 onwards 
as the German assault on the Soviet Union failed  
to strike the killer blow before the Russian 
winter set in and the United States joined the  
war following the attack on Pearl Harbour by 
the Japanese. 1942 saw the Western Allies turn  
the tide in the North Africa campaign against the 
Italians and Germans and in the summer of 1943  
they opened a Southern Front in Italy. Meanwhile 
the Battle of Stalingrad was won by the Russians  
in the autumn and winter of 1942. With this the 
course of the war had changed enormously in favour  
of the allies and any danger that Mosley and other 
British fascist leaders had posed was effectively  
nullified. Consequently, after a major debate in 
the House of Commons in the early winter of 1943,  
the Mosleys were released. They would still spend 
the remainder of the war under house arrest.
Oswald and Diana spent the last year and a half 
of the war living with Mitford relatives and at  
the Shaven Crown Hotel in Oxfordshire. Their 
movements were restricted and they were kept  
under police supervision, but they were reunited 
with their children and were given a large degree  
of liberty. The press covered their movements 
extensively. This was also a period when news of  
the Holocaust of six million of Europe’s Jews and 
the mass murder of other groups such as the Romani  
and Sinti people by the Nazis began arriving to 
Britain in the final months of the war as camps  
were liberated across Europe. In these months 
and the years that followed the war Mosley never  
expressed any regret for his involvement with the 
Nazis in the 1930s or the Anti-Semitism of the  
British Union of Fascists. Moreover, in years to 
come he would become one of the leading voices in  
Britain in efforts to argue that the Holocaust had 
been exaggerated or that it had been orchestrated  
by rogue elements within the SS rather than 
having been directly ordered by Hitler and the  
other senior members of the Nazi regime. As such, 
while Mosley’s politics moved on to other concerns  
in the post-war period, he never expressed any 
contrition for his role in the fascist politics  
of the 1930s and the genocidal programmes 
which had resulted from it on the continent.
With the end of the war in Europe in the early 
summer of 1945 Mosley was now free to return  
to his life without any further punishment. One 
might have expected him to be happy enough to live  
a private life, enjoying his family’s extensive 
wealth and staying out of politics after spending  
half a decade in prison and under house arrest. 
Furthermore, he was not in good social standing  
after the war in a way which might merit a 
political comeback. This did not deter Mosley  
in the slightest. After reconnecting with many 
of those who had been involved in the BUF prior  
to its prohibition on the 23rd of May 1940, 
the very same day that Mosley was arrested,  
he began plotting his political comeback. 
To this end in 1946 and 1947 he published  
two political memoirs and defences of his conduct 
in the 1930s, respectively entitled My Answer and  
The Alternative. My Answer, in particular, set 
out to portray Mosley as a British patriot who  
had been unjustly maligned during the war years. 
His argument was that he could not have known what  
would transpire from 1939 onwards and though it 
would have fallen on deaf ears in the mid-1940s  
there had been many prominent political figures 
who had not exactly been virulently opposed to  
the Nazis back in the 1930s, notably Britain’s 
wartime leader during the First World War, David  
Lloyd George, and the former British monarch, 
Edward VIII. Having presented these arguments  
in his books, Mosley returned to politics 
in 1948 when he formed the Union Movement.
In many ways the Union Movement was a return 
to his old politics. The party certainly fell  
far on the right of the political spectrum, 
its economic views were corporatist and it  
continued the anti-Semitism of the interwar 
fascist movements, with Mosley trying to make  
political capital out of developments in the 
Levant where the Zionist movement had become  
violently opposed to the British Mandate 
administration in the two years following  
the end of the Second World War. But where 
the Union Movement differed from Mosley’s  
pre-war political ideology was in its promotion 
of pan-Europeanism. In his 1947 book, The Answer,  
Mosley laid out a theory that Europe had been 
moving inexorably towards a greater union for  
several centuries, beginning with the formation 
of large nation states such as the United Kingdom,  
Spain, Germany and Italy out of much smaller 
polities during the late medieval and early  
modern periods. Mosley’s conclusion was that the 
formation of a European supra-national state,  
one which would unite countries like Britain, 
France and Germany after centuries of conflict,  
was inevitable. Such a state would operate on 
the basis of a centralised European authority,  
with individual countries retaining large degrees 
of autonomy, but acting in union with one another  
on a wide array of issues, particularly 
economic policy. In this way, Mosley argued,  
the new movement, which he called ‘Europe a 
Nation’, would be able to walk its own relatively  
independent line without being dominated by 
either the United States or the Soviet Union in  
the emerging post-war Cold War order. Thus, very 
quickly after the end of the Second World War,  
Mosley sought to rehabilitate himself as a 
major advocate of pan-Europeanism or a form  
of European nationalism as a replacement to the 
national socialism and corporatism of the 1930s.
There is no disguising the fact that what Mosley 
was arguing for in the post-war years was very  
much a political movement that mirrored 
how the European Coal and Steel Community,  
then the European Economic Community and 
finally the European Union would develop,  
though Britain was slow to embrace involvement 
in the European project and was a hesitant member  
for four decades before pulling out in the late 
2010s. Perhaps it was this British ambivalence  
to the growing pan-European movement which led to 
the Union Movement meeting with little success,  
though it was much more likely that the very 
support of Mosley would have made the British  
public even less supportive of involvement with 
the inaugural ECSC in the 1950s. The British press  
had not forgotten the Mosleys’ wartime betrayal 
and at the start of the 1950s Oswald and Diana  
with their younger children moved to Ireland, a 
country where anyone ostracised from the British  
political system was welcome, no matter how 
dubious the road which had led to their disgrace.  
The Mosleys lived there for several years, an 
exile which was made more favourable by the fact  
that several of Diana Mitford’s siblings also had 
ties to Ireland, Deborah Mitford, for instance,  
having married into the Cavendish family which 
had extensive estates in the south of the country.
As much as Mosley might have tried to embrace 
a less controversial form of politics in  
the post-war years and attempted a political 
comeback, his politics retained their racist  
edge. Two developments in the 1950s emphasise 
this. The first of these related to Africa. In  
the aftermath of the war Britain was unable to 
ignore calls for independence from many of its  
colonies. After India and Pakistan acquired 
their independence in 1947 calls escalated  
for the same in Africa where the British 
held lands covering much of southern Africa  
around modern-day Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia, 
extensive territories further north around Uganda,  
Kenya and Sudan and other lands to the west in 
Nigeria and Ghana. Mosley’s solution to calls for  
independence was a form of continent-wide 
Apartheid whereby the European powers,  
Britain and France being the two nations who 
controlled huge swathes of the continent,  
would divide their colonies into white and 
black controlled areas, mirroring in many ways  
the system which had been created in South Africa 
in the late 1940s to preserve the position of the  
white minority Afrikaner community there. 
Mosley’s proposals were soon abandoned,  
especially in the aftermath of the disastrous Suez 
Crisis of 1956 and the British and French began  
granting independence to nations all across the 
continent. Mosley would remain an ardent supporter  
of the Apartheid regime in South Africa for the 
remainder of his life, visiting there in the 1960s  
long after the Apartheid movement had started to 
become controversial internationally. Furthermore,  
he continued holding business interests in South 
Africa throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
The second episode which was revelatory of 
Mosley’s racial views in the post-war period  
occurred in Britain itself in the late 1950s. 
In the immediate aftermath of the war, Britain,  
like many other European countries, had been 
left with a large labour shortage owing to the  
death of hundreds of thousands of young men 
during the war. Where Germany, for instance,  
had turned to countries like Turkey for foreign 
workers, Britain reached out to its empire. In  
the course of the late 1940s tens of thousands 
of people began arriving from the Caribbean and  
other regions, the so-called Windrush Generation, 
named after the HMS Empire Windrush, a ship that  
had arrived with one of the first large numbers of 
Caribbean migrants in 1948. By the mid-1950s the  
growing influx of people from overseas into London 
and England more broadly was creating increasing  
inter-community hostility in some parts of 
England’s major cities, especially during periods  
of low employment when people born in England 
perceived the newcomers as taking jobs they might  
otherwise have acquired. This led in the autumn 
of 1958 to the Notting Hill Race Riots in the  
Notting Hill area of London. A week of violence 
saw attacks on people of West Indian descent and  
scores of arrests. Mosley’s reaction was to return 
to England and run for election in the Kensington  
district of London in 1959, fashioning his 
campaign around exploiting racial tensions in the  
capital. Some of the proposals he mooted during 
the campaign were regressive in the extreme,  
not just favouring a ban on further migration 
from the empire or what remained of it, but also  
proposing forced deportations of those who had 
arrived in the decade or so after the war and a  
ban on intermarriage. It was as close to a major 
political breakthrough that he would ever have in  
the post-war years, capturing nearly 10% of the 
vote, though ultimately failing to win a seat.
In the aftermath of his failed election bid in 
1959 Mosley relocated with Diana to Paris. They  
spent the remainder of their lives for the most 
part in Orsay, a wealthy suburb on the outskirts  
of the city. From here he began efforts to 
try to co-ordinate with other pan-European,  
far-right political movements in other countries. 
This led in the 1960s to the formation of the  
National Party of Europe, an umbrella organisation 
which included Mosley’s Union Movement in Britain,  
the Deutsche Reichspartei in West Germany, 
the Italian Social Movement and Jeune Europe  
in Belgium, all far-right parties with elements 
of neo-fascism in their workings. A manifesto  
released in 1962 foreshadowed many elements 
of what would become the European Union,  
calling for a European parliament and other 
federal measures of that kind. But others harked  
back to the corporatist politics of the right in 
the 1930s in declaring the movement’s antipathy  
to both communism and capitalism. Effectively 
it called for a third way whereby Europe would  
separate itself off from both the US and the USSR, 
while another proposal was for the dismantling  
of the United Nations and its replacement with a 
tripartite body which would be formed of the US,  
the USSR and the new European supra-national 
state. A final novel element to it was the  
description of parts of Africa as constituting 
part of Europe, clearly a provision that was  
designed to keep the Maghreb under European 
control in order to generate support for the  
movement in France as that country was still 
at war to try to retain control over Algeria.
The National Party of Europe met with 
very little success in the 1960s or 1970s,  
though its policy platform is curious in 
retrospect as offering an alternative view of  
pan-Europeanism at a time when the founder members 
of the European Steel and Coal Community were only  
beginning to consider the idea of a more formal 
union between their countries. Interestingly,  
while the far right has generally become opposed 
to European federalism in the intervening decades,  
in the 1960s far right parties were in favour of 
federalism, though of a kind which sought to curb  
migration from overseas and implied a land grab of 
North Africa. Meeting with little success in the  
initiative, Mosley began writing an autobiography 
in the second half of the 1960s, one which would  
build on the political defence he had first 
provided in My Answer back in 1946. My Life was  
published in 1968. It was hardly an attempt to 
seek redemption for his past political life,  
but rather sought to explain away certain 
criticisms of him which had been made over  
the years, with Mosley being unrepentant in 
his views that Europe should be a continent  
for Europeans and claiming that his politics in 
the 1930s was a response to the ineffectiveness  
of both Labour and the Conservatives.

By the time My Life was published in 1968  
Mosley had entered his seventies. His health 
was gradually declining. He had made one last  
effort to gain election in Britain in 1966 and 
after a fresh humiliation in which he acquired  
less than 5% of the vote he effectively resigned 
himself to the end of his political career. The  
Union Movement was wound up in the early 1970s 
and was replaced by the National Front as the  
main far-right party in Britain. By the time it 
began in the mid-1970s to gain some popularity  
in Britain as the UK entered the worst economic 
crisis it had seen since the Great Depression,  
Mosley was suffering from Parkinson’s in France. 
His last years were spent largely uninvolved in  
active politics owing to poor health and old age. 
He died in Orsay on the 3rd of December 1980 at 84  
years of age. A small funeral was held in Paris 
after which Oswald was cremated and his remains  
were scattered around the famous Pere Lachaise 
Cemetery. Just over two years later, his eldest  
son, Nicholas, born in 1923 of his first marriage 
to Cynthia, published a two-volume biography of  
his father and the Mosleys’ family life. Oswald 
had requested Nicholas, who he had a difficult  
relationship with, to write it, making his private 
papers fully available to allow him to do so.  
The work was generally critical of Oswald and his 
political career while humanising him as a father.
Oswald Mosley was a complex figure. It would be 
easy today to dismiss him as simply a would-be  
fascist dictator of Britain, and admittedly there 
were many elements of that kind to his politics.  
Yet his political views in the 1930s should not 
be read entirely in light of what the Nazis did  
across Europe in the late 1930s and first half 
of the 1940s. There were different types of  
corporatism and fascism, such as Franco’s regime 
in Spain. Similarly Mosley’s form of corporatism  
was different to what was being espoused in 
Germany. Moreover, his economic policies were  
endorsed by a large cross section of leading 
British economists during the Great Depression,  
while his pan-Europeanism after the Second World 
War foreshadowed the general drift of politics  
within what has become the European Union. 
However, these complicating factors aside,  
there is absolutely no doubt that Mosley also 
advocated for a form of racial hierarchy,  
one which displayed acute Anti-Semitism and 
also called for racial segregation across  
Africa where much of the continent would 
have been transformed into an expanded  
version of Apartheid South Africa. As such, 
while his political views were complicated,  
they were also not entirely estranged 
from the racial fascism of Nazism.
What do you think of Oswald Mosley? Should he 
be perceived as a straight forward fifth-column  
of the Nazi movement within Britain or 
was he a more complex figure? Please let  
us know in the comment section, and in the 
meantime, thank you very much for watching.

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