The Rest Is History - 373. Oswald Mosley: Fascist Leader

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

The fascists in Britain have found a leader known across the country: the sinister yet complex Oswald Mosley. Following stints as an MP for both the Tories and Labour, Mosley, a veteran of the First World War, forms the British Union of Fascists in 1932, making a big effort to appeal to women and the working class. Although his rhetoric is surprisingly anti-militarist, the violence that occurs at his fascist meeting in Kensington Olympia in 1934, the same month as the Night of the Long Knives, will have irreversible effects on the development of his new party. Join Tom and Dominic in the second episode of our series on British Fascism, as they look at Oswald Mosley, his influences, his role within British society, and the rise of the British Union of Fascists… *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. It is about time, I proceeded, that some public-spirited person came along and told you where you got off. The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of halfwits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting hail spode and you imagine it is the voice of the people this is where you make your bloomer what the voice of the people is saying is look at that frightful ass spode swanking about in footer bags did you ever in your path see such a perfect per. But Dominic was a Bertie Worcester philosopher

and political analyst in P.G. Woodhouse's The Code of the Worcesters, which he wrote in 1938. And Sir Roderick Spode, who's the kind of bogeyman in the Bertie Worcester stories, is a not-so-subtle portrait of Sir Oswald Moseley, who is the leader of the black shirts. So hence the black shorts that Spode wears. And the end of the first episode that we did, we were looking at the roots and the kind of the first emergings of British fascism. And you left it on this cliffhanger saying that British fascism needed a plausible leader.

And it finds its plausible leader, or is he plausible? I mean, we can discuss that in the form of Sir Oswald Mosley, who is, as you said at the end of the previous episode, a fascinating character. I mean, very sinister character. You can see, just to repeat what we said in the last episode, you can see him being interviewed on ITV in 1970s. It's very, very odd. He's a remarkable character. And as you say, a much more complicated and fascinating individual than I think many people realize.

So you hear the name fascist and you think, just a sinister pantomime villain. Mosley is not a pantomime villain at all. The one thing I will say, however, is that that brilliant reading made me realize for the first time the true nature of the rest of this history dynamic. You are Bertie. And you're Jeeves. Has that not occurred to you before, Tom? Alternatively, of course, I could be Bertie and you could be Gussie Fink-Nottle.

I think I'm more Gussie Fink-Nottle. With my mutes. You'd just be mutes. Yeah, but you're a few steps for crickets, aren't you? And Gussie doesn't like crickets. No, there's the vicar, isn't there? The curate, who's awfully good at cricket. Is he Stilton Cheesewright?

No, Stinker Pinker. Stinker Pinker, of course. Stinker Pinker, very good. This will mean nothing to people who've never read P.G. Woodhouse. It would amaze people to know that we like

P.G. Woodhouse. They would never have anticipated that. So, Oswald Mosley, yes. So, at the end of the last episode, we talked about how British fascism got to the end of the 1920s.

All the ingredients in some ways are there. I mean, Britain, of course, hasn't lost the First World War, which is a huge... It's a plus. Yeah, it's a plus for Britain, a minus if you're a fascist. But the anti-Semitism, the anxiety about Bolshevism, the belief that Britain has become corrupted, the distrust of democracy, parliamentary democracy. All of those ingredients are floating around, not just politically, but they're in the national imagination and John Buckner and Agatha Christie and Bulldog Drummond and all

these things. But they lack the front man, and the front man they're going to find is Oswald Mosley. Now, Mosley, as I said, is a really remarkable figure. He was born in 1896, and he comes from a kind of family of Staffordshire landowners. So that's in the West Midlands for those people who are not from Britain. That's where the Hollands come from. It's where the Sandbrookes, it's not far from where I grew up. His mother has a family home in Shropshire, my home county, but Mosley spends most of his time at his grandfather's house, which is Rolston Hall in Staffordshire. His grandfather,

Tom, was supposed to look just like John Bull and was in fact called John Bull. His grandfather was nicknamed John Bull. And young Sir Oswald, or Tom, as his friends and family called him, in that sort of way that the British aristocracy did in the early 20th century. Yeah, so like Boris Johnson was called Alex by his family. But his name was Alex. I mean, he was christened Alex. So young Tom Moseley, he grows up there. His mother and father had parted company when he was five. So he has his grandfather, John Bull, but he doesn't have a father figure,

and he's a very spoiled little boy. His mother, we talked in the last episode about Rota Linton Orman, the founder of the British fascists. She was called the man-woman. Well, Oswald Moses' mother called him her man-child. And to some extent, I think there's an argument by Robert Skidelsky, his biographer, that he remained a man-child all his life, this sort of spoiled brat. The Peter Pan of mid-war British politics. But I think there is an element to that, Tom.

He's impatient. He wants everything now. He won't take no for an answer. And as we will see, those things lead him into progressively more and more trouble. To become Captain Hook. To become Captain Hook. Very good. So he goes to Winchester College, Rishi Sunak's old school. He's a very tall, sporty kind of person. He's

quite a loner and he's quite haughty. People say of him at school that he sort of keeps himself to himself and he thinks himself better than the other boys. He's a brilliant fencer. So he wins the public schools fencing championship in both foil and saber. And had he not been injured in the first world war, his biographers say it's plausible he would have won the World Fencing Championship. He goes to Sandhurst Military Training School for Officers in the early 1914 when he's 17 years old. He has a fight at Sandhurst with some other boys, young men, and he fractures his right

ankle. This is the first in a series of breaks that will end up leaving him with this limp. He then, when the war breaks out, he joins the Royal Flying Corps. He gets a pilot's license and he's showing off at an air show type thing, a demonstration in front of his mother in 1915 when he crashes his plane and breaks the same ankle. He breaks it again. But then because of the demands for men in the First World War, he's sent to the trenches before his leg has properly healed. And he spends months in the

trenches under fire, but eventually he is evacuated, sent home for operations on this leg, which hasn't healed properly. They save his leg, but he is left with a permanent limp. That is, by the way, a great asset to him. It means he has a genuine kind of war wound, a very visible war wound, but that's not otherwise incapacitated him. And that experience of war generally is immensely important for Moseley. So Robert Skidelsky, his biographer, I think we'll talk a little bit about Robert Skidelsky's biography in this, because Lord Skidelsky, as he now is, is most famous as the biography of John Maynard Keynes. And his biography of Moseley, the first to take Moseley seriously,

torpedoed Skidelsky's academic career. He was denied tenure at Johns Hopkins University in the United States because his biography was seen as soft on Moseley. And he never got a job at Oxbridge for the same reason, so he ended up professor at Warwick. And he never got a job at Oxbridge for the same reason. So he ended up professor at Warwick. And he's one of Britain's most eminent public intellectuals. But because he took Mosley seriously and he said,

he's not just a villain. You know, there's lots of interesting things. And he was really strong on Mosley's relationship with the economist John Maynard Keynes and the links between Mosleyism and Keynesianism. Is that what made him interested in? Yes, I think it is.

I think it is, exactly. So Mosley is, of all fascist leaders, I think by far the most interesting. And he is a sinister man, but he's clever, genuine, and thoughtful in a way that is not true necessarily, certainly not true of Hitler, and not true of Mussolini.

So Mosley comes back from the war, and he's very typical of lots of young men of his generation, of his class. Harold McMillan is a really good example, the British prime minister in the 50s and 60s. Anthony Eden, actually, as well. Clement Attlee? Well, Clement Attlee, to some degree, I guess. Well, Clement Attlee injured in Mesopotamia, Major Attlee.

There is this whole generation of young men who come out of the war. They want a new start. They are really full of dissatisfaction when they get back to Britain. Not the same kind of dissatisfaction as the John Buchan heroes we talked about in the last episode. But resentment of old men, isn't it? The old men. The old men who sent us to war and are still running the country. Lloyd George, the corrupt old man, all of these people. So Mosley comes back and he's fired up with that. And he's also fired up with the sense of brotherhood that so many people have from the trenches. Same kind of brotherhood that you see reflected actually in the Lord of the Rings or something,

J.R.R. Tolkien, Frodo and Sam. Mosley comes back. He's obviously still got all his kind of aristocratic connections. He becomes a very popular guest at the sort of dinner parties and salons in London. Lady Astor, Lady Colfax, Lady Cunard. And he's a philanderer. So he, as Skidelsky says, mostly slept with the hostesses and was taken up by the politicians.

This was the period of his apprenticeship, his substitute for a university. As his confidence grew, the seduced turned into the seducer. The conqueror of the bedroom became the coquette of the platform. So he's a great hit at these parties, and he's taken up by the conservatives, and he becomes the conservative candidate for Harrow in 1918. He says right at the time, he says, my policy is socialistic imperialism. So it's a very kind of red Toryism. He actually has red posters, red rosettes. And he wants lots of state control of things, a real break with kind of laissez-faire conservatism.

The conservatives are really in flux at this period. So nobody really notices. It's fine. He can get away with it. He goes into the commons. He's the baby of the house, said the youngest member. He's only 22. And he straightaway gets a reputation as a very sort of slashing speaker.

His maiden speech is an attack on Winston Churchill, who's got two jobs. And he says, you can't reasonably have two jobs, minister of war and minister of air. He's keen on feminism. So he's kind of forward thinking and modern. He sets himself up as the spokesman in Britain, the political spokesman for the younger generation. And he's very articulate. This is 1919. Beware lest old age steal back and rob you of your reward. Lest old dead men with their old dead So that's him sort of speaking to youth and that stuff about cleansed in the blood. Of course, that sounds very sinister to Ares now. We might say, ah, there's a sign of the fascism.

But I mean, people are talking like that all the time in 1918, 1919, 1920. He marries really well. So about the time that he's making that speech, he meets Lord Curzon's daughter, Cynthia, or Simi, as she's known. Lord Curzon, the former Viceroy of India, very big man in conservative politics. Great enthusiast for the Taj Mahal. Great enthusiast for the Taj Mahal. Great enthusiast for the Taj Mahal. Quite right, Tom.

A most superior person, Lord Curzon, the most superior person on the planet in his own estimation anyway. Can't open a window. So if he wants the window open, throws logs out through the pane of glass. Yeah. So to marry Lord Curzon's daughter is a very impressive thing. They marry. It's a sign of Moses' importance at that point, his connections, that the king is there,

George V, the queen is there, the king and queen of Belgium are there. So presumably these are Curzon's guests rather than Mosley's. But even so, it's a remarkable thing. Mosley is never faithful to his wife. He's still messing around with married women at all these political salons and there's a wonderful story that in 1933 he told another very rakish mp robert boothby he says to boothby i've i've come clean to simi i've told her about all my other women and boothby said all of them tom and uh mostly said well all of them except her stepmother and her sister.

I see. Hello. That's Terry Thomas. And there is a bit of the Terry Thomas about him. Me? Sir Oswald Mosley? In a dormitory for French maids? What were they thinking? Right. If you don't know who Terry Thomas is,

so that would be all of our overseas listeners, just Google him. Thomas' impersonation actually is quite good, but I think we don't want to... No, I was doing... That was the guy from the Fast Show. So it's an impression of an impression. Right. It was an impression of an impression, yes. At the end of 1920, Mosley leaves the Conservatives. He walks out to the Conservative Party. And actually, the breach is because he attacks them about the use of the Black and Tans, the auxiliaries in Ireland. That is ironic.

To fight, yeah. The use of paramilitaries effectively. So he's opposed to the use of paramilitary forces. Correct. And the funny thing is, you see, Mosley at this point is a very, he is modern. He is progressive. He is forward thinking. Well, fascism is modern as well, isn't it? Well, this is the thing. British fascism, I think, is unusually modern by the standards of European fascisms in the 1920s and 30s. So actually, you don't get as much of the medievalism, the faux archaic stuff. So that's why there's no King Arthur,

which we talked about in the previous episode. Right. So first, he's an independent, spends some time as an independent, and then he decides he's going to join the Labour Party. This is not that unusual. There is quite a lot. I mean, Martin Pugh, who wrote Hurrah for the Black Shirts, he wrote a history of the Labour Party. And one of his really big and interesting points was about the crossover, not between Labour and the Liberals, but between the Labour and the Tories. There were quite a lot of people who moved from the Tories into Labour in the 1920s, including lots of working-class voters. Stanley Baldwin's son, Clement Attlee, came from a Tory family,

not a Liberal family, a Tory family. So there were a lot of people who thought the Liberals are kind of high-minded, vegetarian, weedy... Prune juice drinkers. Prune juice drinking bookish people. And actually, I'm a patriotic working man, or champion of the working man, the working man's pint, the empire, all of that kind of thing. But I believe that the miners should have better wages. And mostly joins the Labour Party, and the Labour

Party are delighted to have him. They are thrilled. There's a wonderful description in Martin Pugh's book of him going to a big Labour Party meeting, 2,000 people there. Moseley goes onto the platform. The crowd of Labour Party supporters sing for he's a jolly good fellow. A lady in furs, an elegant lady in furs gets up to give a speech of introduction and a whisper goes around, Lady Cynthia, Lady Cynthia Moseley, Lord Curzon's daughter. They love it. They can't get enough of this.

Mosley is a big star. So when he says he's going to join Labour, 70 Labour constituency parties ask him to be their candidate. He's a fighter. He chooses Birmingham, the home of popular Toryism, because he wants to stand against Neville Chamberlain. And he loses by only 77 votes in the Chamberlain stronghold in Birmingham, the absolute heartland of kind of working class, true blue conservatism. That makes his name. People say, my God, he took on the toughest fight and he almost won it. So he then gets a seat in Smethwick in the West Midlands. And he is an absolute star. He's very prominent in the Labour Party.

Is that Enoch Powell's seat? Enoch Powell's seat is in Wolverhampton. Smethwick is very, very close, just a few miles away in the black country. But Smethwick is famous because there was a by-election there in the 1960s with a racist campaign. So mostly, there he is, he's the MP from Smethwick. He throws himself into Labour Party politics. He tours the slums.

He goes and visits coal miners. He goes to mining villages all over Britain. He gives donations to miners who've been on strike. He's very close to the miners' leader, Arthur Cook. He goes to India. He goes to the United States. He goes fishing with Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States to pick up ideas. He is elected three times to the National Executive of the Labour Party, the NEC, 1927, 28, and 1930. And he will end up falling out with the Labour Party, but not because he's too right-wing, quite the reverse in some ways. In 1925, Mosley had written a book or co-authored a book by a friend of his called John Strakey, a member of the Labour Party, called Revolution by Reason. It was an economic book

that, as Robert Skidelsky says in his biography of Moseley, anticipates what John Maynard Keynes is going to say about the right economic formula to ensure a successful, prosperous society. So invest money in public works. Yeah, and invest money in public works, fight unemployment, create demand. There's not enough demand. People don't have enough money to join in the new emerging consumer society. That's why there's so much unemployment. If you create demand, if you put money in people's pockets, then they will go out and

spend, and that will create this kind of virtuous circle. This is a very simplified version of Keynesianism. Skidelsky says of Mosley's ideas, it was a precise foreshadowing of the Keynesian philosophy of demand management. They minus the theory that justified it. Now, he comes up with this in Britain, because in Britain, unlike in the United States, unemployment is really high in the 20s. So by 1930, unemployment had gone up to 2.5 million, which is about 16% of the workforce, so much higher. It's one reason why the Depression is not so much a shock in

Britain, because actually Britain's kind of been in this mess all along since the end of the First World War. Labour get in in the 1929 election, Ramsay MacDonald. But Ramsay MacDonald, the leader of the Labour Party, and the people around him are economically much more conservative than Moseley. They don't believe in borrowing and spending lots of money on public works. They believe that it's the job of a Labour Party to show that they're responsible by running the economy in the sort of rigorous, conservative way that a Tory government would have done. And in February 1930, Moseley writes this memorandum called the Moseley Memorandum, which most historians, lots of historians of early 20th century Britain would say is one of the absolute kind of landmark, most fascinating documents because it's a really detailed blueprint, far more detailed than anything produced by any other fascist leader, calling for basically a complete Keynesian

model for the British economy. So he wants a sort of inner cabinet of experts from industry and economics professors and businessmen and stuff. He wants an economic general staff run by Keynes that will plan the national economy and the national interest. He wants to borrow and spend 200 million pounds on public works to create jobs for people, all of this kind of stuff. And actually what it anticipates is the New Deal. So for our American listeners, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. But does it not also, it anticipates what will become

Nazi economics? The idea that you don't depend on economic policy for elected politicians because you can't trust them. You have a sense of what is good for the nation that is divorced from parliamentary politics. A little bit, yes. Funnily enough, Tom, the emphasis on experts is a very fascist thing. So the idea that you bring in disinterested people, not tainted, as you say, not tainted by parliamentary politics, not corrupted, they will come in and they will plan the national economy. That's something that lots of people in Mussolini's Italy would have said, oh, we've been doing this for years. This is also something that people involved with Roosevelt's New Deal would say, who are obviously not fascists, but are interested in what Mussolini

is doing. They would say, yeah, this makes sense. Set up a big board of experts. Five-year plans are all the rage in Soviet Union, but you also have this on the right. Again, you have the sense that for parliamentary democracies, fashion is moving against them on both the left and the right, the flanks. I think that's right. This is the future. This is the future. Moseley takes it to the old men in the Labour cabinet and they say, no, we don't like it. He takes it to the whole meeting of the Labour parliamentary party and they back the leadership, not him. But interestingly, a couple of the people who do back him,

two of his chief supporters, one of them is Stanley Baldwin's son, Oliver, Tom, who we've talked about before. Another one is now secular saint for the British left, and Aaron Bevan, founder of the National Health Service. He also backs Moseley and says his way is the way to go. But Moseley doesn't get his way. So he doesn't immediately walk out of the Labour Party. He's gearing up for a strop. He is. He goes to the Labour Party conference and his plan is defeated by 1.2 million votes to 1 million votes. These are big votes controlled by the trade unions often. But he still wins election to the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party at that late stage. However,

because his memorandum hasn't been accepted, because he is a bit of a spoiled brat, because he is impatient, the man-child, sick of the old men, all that stuff, he flounces out of the Labour Party. And in February 1931, with backing from the car manufacturer, William Morris, so who ends up founding the famous, in Britain anyway, famous Nuffield Charitable Enterprises, all the Nuffield hospitals and the Nuffield studies and all that sort of thing. With backing from Morris, he sets up a new political party,

not the British Union of Fascists, but it is called, excitingly, the New Party. So at that stage, Baldwin's son is one of his backers. Baldwin's son supports him. But Baldwin's son then later reverses and goes back into the Labour Party. And even at that point, when they had New Party meetings, they are harangued by hecklers. Now that, by the way, is absolutely standard in British politics in the early 20th century. This isn't something that came in with fascism. There'd always been rowdiness and punch-ups and heckling and shouting at political meetings. It was established for political parties to have stewards who would kind of get stuck

into the hecklers. And even at this point, Mosley has a group of people who are called the Biff boys. These are the ones who are trained by the England rugby captain. Is that right? So the England rugby captain, Peter Howard is one of his supporters. There's also a boxer called Kid Lewis,

who is one of his supporters. And they're kind of, you know, having punch-ups with communists and people who are still in the Labour Party who are shouting at Mosley during these meetings. But his timing is terrible because in 1931, British politics is overcome by complete crisis, complete financial crisis. The Labour cabinet splits irrevocably and the king, George V, brokers a deal where a rump Labour government led by Ramsay MacDonald will get into bed with Stanley Baldwin's Conservatives and part of the Liberal Party, so a national government.

And they go to the country in October 1931, and they win the biggest victory in the history of British politics. The rest of the Labour Party, who are against the national government, are reduced to 52 seats. The national government, dominated by Baldwin's Tories, win pretty much all the other seats. And the new party wins just 0.2% of the vote, and it's utterly overwhelmed. And so Mosley, who's flounced out of the Labour Party- Struts out, one might almost say. Right. Yes. I'm surprised you don't say he's goose-stepped out of the Labour Party. Struts out, one might almost say. Right. Yes. I'm surprised you don't say he's goose-stepped out of the... He's walked out of the Labour Party. He looks like a fool now. That said, he doesn't have to become a fascist. So lots of people... He's still having dinner with people like... Dinner parties with Churchill,

with Lloyd George, with lots of people who like an eccentric, they like a character. And both the Conservatives and the Labour Party would be very happy to welcome him back. But mostly has got it into his head that by forming this coalition, this national government, they have signed their own death warrant, that they will fail to deal with the economic crisis, they will be overwhelmed, and that some opposition force, the voice of the new generation, will come in and sweep everything up and take over. He thinks that will be him, and that is what impels him to found another new party.

That's the new party we'll be talking about Tom after the break Okay, we will be back very soon I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull

back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Tom Moseley is a cad and a wrongan. Thatic, as I'm sure I don't need to tell you, is Stanley Baldwin's impression of Tom Sir Oswald Mosley. Baldwin, who we have described perhaps as the embodiment of parliamentary democracy in this period. And this coalition government that's been stitched together from the rump of the Labour Party, Liberal MPs, and the mass of the Conservative Party. I guess on one level, it could be cast as the will of the British

people, this enormous, overwhelming democratic mandate that it's had. But I guess if you're on the fringes, if you despise all the various leaders of these parties who've come together, you would say that it's representative of the bankruptcy of parliamentary democracy. Do you think that's how Moseley feels? Oh, absolutely it is. And actually, I like the fact that you introduced it with Baldwin because you could take Moseley and Baldwin as polar opposites here. Moseley is charismatic, dashing, flamboyant, handsome, a man who loves the limelight. And he looks at Baldwin and he says, a little man, a nothing, an empty suit, Mr. Boring. Of course, Baldwin, uxorious, God-fearing, prays on his knees every night, sees himself as the sort of embodiment of national small-c

conservatism. He looks at Mosley and he says, for all his gifts, he is a terrible bounder. You know, he's a philanderer. He cheats on his wife. He cheats on his friends. Mosley can't be trusted. So they are kind of polar opposites in that way. And of course, there are more Baldwin's in Britain than there are Mosley's, it's fair to say. So Mosley goes off at the beginning of 1932.

He goes to Italy, very bad move, because he absolutely falls in love with what he sees in Italy. The fascist dignitaries, they show him around, they say, look at all these public works, all the stuff that you wanted to do in Britain and were denied. Keynesianism, exactly. He meets Mussolini. He considers Mussolini charming. Mussolini actually says to him, I'm not sure that Britain will really go for that kind of fascism. It's not as militaristic as... So Mussolini is not a complete fool, but Moseley is completely in love with Mussolini. Mussolini is everything he wants to be, the voice of youth, the personification of vigor and dynamism and stuff.

And he comes back to Britain suffused with excitement. He's also got a new relationship, hasn't he, Tom? That I know you're very excited about. He has. So he has met with Diana Mitford, who is the most beautiful, the most glamorous, the most sophisticated star of the social scene. She is the brightest of the bright young things.

But let's not dwell on her and what happens with that, because we'll save that for our fourth episode, which will focus on the Mitfords. When people say she was the most beautiful girl in England, I always think, well, you've seen them all. I mean, how is that?

Anyway, I don't want to be too sceptical about the Mitfords too soon, Tom, because I want to save that for episode four. So, October 1932, Moseley launches his new party, the British Union of Fascists. You know, extraordinary rhetoric.

Better the great adventure, better defeat, disaster, better by far the end of that trivial thing called a political career than posturing and strutting on the stage of little England amid the scenery of decadence. So this is his appeal. Interestingly, when he launches it in 1932, there is no mention of the Jews at all. So he hasn't identified the Jews as his enemy, despite the example of Hitler. But of course, he's not that bothered about Hitler. Hitler hasn't come to power yet, has he? Hitler hasn't come, exactly. Hitler has not yet come to power. Much bigger for Mosley is his pal, Mussolini, who he thinks is the big man. He's not as interested in Hitler.

Well, I was just wondering, I mean, Mussolini is, of course, a militarist. He does love posing in a uniform. And if Mussolini can see that the idea of posing in a uniform might raise problems for the British, why doesn't Mosley? Because he goes for his black shirts and everything. Yeah, mostly goes for his black shirts and everything. Yeah, Mosley goes for the black shirts. I think he thinks that the spirit of the trenches, he thinks that will have tremendous appeal to younger voters. He's obviously been profoundly affected by his time in the First World War. And I think he thinks, actually, you know what?

A uniform gives us a sense of identity, a sense of glamour, all of this sort of stuff. So obviously the black shirts come from Italy. It's the Italians who had worn black shirts first. And I think he, I mean, the very fact that he calls his party the British Union of Fascists, he's perfectly happy to admit his debt to Italy. And the very first symbol they adopt is the fascis.

Which is then replaced with a lightning bolt, isn't it? On a Union Jack. And even at this stage, actually, those sort of weird eccentric people that we were talking about in the first episode who had been fascists in the 1920s, a lot of them are very suspicious of Mosley. And they say, nah, he's not really a fascist. He's not anti-Jewish enough.

He's been an MP. He's part of the old corrupt gang of politicians. He's not extreme enough, actually, for them. I mean, Mosley's party, when he first launched this in 1932, it is fascinating because it makes a big effort to appeal to women, makes a big effort to appeal to the working classes. And it's not, you said about the militarism, he's not proposing to invade anybody or go to war with anyone. Quite the reverse. He says the lesson of the First World War is never again.

So actually, that slightly messes with one's expectation of fascism. Right. But that just, again, I mean, I understand that, that there is absolutely, weirdly, a pacifist strain to it. Certainly, I mean, he will present, certainly in the build-up to the Second World War and then during the Second World War itself, he will present himself as a leader of the Peace Party. Yeah.

But that just makes it all the odder that he doesn't, I mean, he's a very smart guy. If Mussolini can see that going for the uniforms might be a problem, why doesn't he? I think a lot of people said of Mosley that he, I mean, that thing about him being like a child, he lacks any self-awareness and he is drunk with his own excitement. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. Because obviously there is a sense of excitement about it. He loves the show.

So is that what it is, the theatricality of it? Oh, the theatricality is really important to him. He wants to be the star. He wants to put on these great theatrical spectacles. He's buoyed up by the excitement of the crowds. And action.

He believes in action. I mean, remember we did the podcast, Tom, with Lucy Hughes-Hallett about the Italian poet and proto-fascist Gabriele D'Annunzio. And the fascination

that people had of that generation. I mean, D'Annunzio is an earlier generation. All the people that he's. And the fascination that people had of that generation, I mean, Donunzio is an earlier generation, but all the people that he's influenced, the fascination with action, fighting, violence, blood, all that stuff. I think Mosley has all that. He sees himself as a romantic hero of a great adventure story. And the uniforms, the trappings of militarism, it has a fascist defense force, 300 men. Most of them were recruited from among the unemployed. They're

put up in a kind of barracks. They wear britches, they wear leather boots and all these kinds of things. Now all that, which we now see, of course, you were saying before about not projecting our own, what we know. We see all that as incredibly sinister, understandably. And some people at the time saw it as sinister. But lots of people didn't think it was sinister. They thought this is an attempt to preserve the camaraderie, the loyalty, all those things that we knew in the war. There is a massive but, which is that Moseley is upfront about saying that parliamentary democracy has run its shot, that it should be abolished, that it's long in tooth and claw. Yeah, he does say that. He wants parliament.

Parliament would still exist, but people wouldn't be elected by constituencies. They would represent groups. There'd be housewives, representatives, and there'd be representatives of small shopkeepers. Coal miners. Coal miners, exactly. And it'd be a kind of corporate state. He has a very complicated blueprint, probably the most elaborate of any fascist blueprint, for a kind

of corporate state. They'd still have the king. The king would have more power. The king would be choosing from among the various experts and you know all that sort of thing i mean the idea that george v will go for this is obviously completely bonkers because george v is so conservative but you know as we'll maybe discuss maybe one of his sons will yeah you're right so who does go for this then he makes a big effort among ex-servicemen the thing is when they get all these ex-servicemen and the descriptions of them that we have from other fascists is that basically these ex-servicemen. The thing is, when they get all these ex-servicemen,

the descriptions of them that we have from other fascists is that basically these ex-servicemen, they're people called Sid or something, they just sit around in the headquarters drinking tea and feeling miserable and talking about the Battle of Loos or something. So there's a slight sense of, I mean, basically, if you're a successful person with lots going on, you're probably not going to join this kind of

slightly eccentric party. So they're people who are looking for something, looking for a purpose, looking for meaning. There are lots of what people at the time would have called faddists. So people who may be drinking exotic fruit juices and spending too much time reading strange books. Well, but these are the kind of people who belong to the liberals, aren't they? So what are they doing joining the fascists? Well, maybe there's an

interesting crossover the fruit juice crossover they would try to recruit at the rotary club at the british legion i mean they do get some people they get young people they are some used to see the by 1934 so two years into its existence, the BUF had set up branches in at least 11 public schools. So Winchester, Mosley's old school, Rishisunak School had a BUF branch, Haleybury, Millhill, Marlborough, Stowe. I don't know about Dulwich, Tom. I know you're fascinated by Dulwich.

But also, he's appealing to people in industrial areas as well. In the North, he makes a big effort. Because, of course, that's partly what he's been doing as a Labour MP. So talking of the North, you know that one of the venues that he fills up is Usher Hall in Edinburgh, where we appeared. Really? So we were given the rest as politics stick in episode one about being in the Albert Hall with a load of fascists, centrist fascists. And we have our own dirty little secrets on. Yes, we do.

Appearing at fascist venues. Yeah. So they got 2000 members in Leeds. They're very big with women and with aristocratic women in particular. So just look at the list. Viscountess Down, Lady Clare Annersley, Lady Howard of Effingham, Lady Pearson. There were even ex-suffragettes. So there's a quote here from an ex-suffragette called Mary Richardson. I was first attracted to the black shirts because

I saw in them the courage, the action, the loyalty, the gift of service, and the ability to serve, which I had known in the suffragette movement. And Dominic, are any press barons signing up to the black shirts? So from the beginning, the BUF does try quite hard to win over people in the establishment. So they have a thing called the January Club, which is a kind of front organization. And that will get in lots of writers, lots of people who end up becoming Conservative MPs. So the two Conservative ministers in the post-war years, a guy called Alan Lennox Boyd and Duncan Sands, who was in charge of defence. So just a question. Yeah.

From the point of view of the parliamentary parties, are Labour and Conservatives equally hostile to it? Does it appeal more to Conservatives? Do people in the Labour Party feel sympathy for the economic programme? Because basically, it's kind of patriotism of the right and the social policies of the left, isn't it? At this stage, I think if you were being relatively generous to the British Union of Fascists, you would say at this stage, going just by its manifesto, yes, as you say, it is protectionist, it is nationalistic, it is Keynesian economics, and it's kind of corporatist, but they're not in their official publications. They're not picking on minorities. They are talking about the old gang of politicians and all that kind of thing,

but they're not, especially in the official stuff, anti-Semitic. That said, even at the early stage, there are lots of anti-Semites in. Piling in. Yeah, piling in. But you said about Conservatives and Labour, among the personnel, far more Conservative than Labour. So you look at the list of people, there are lots of MPs who go to these January Club dinners and things. So these dinners are not branded with the BUF thing, but they're a kind of halfway house, if you like. There are lots of people with titles, Lord Middleton, El Jellico, the Marcus of Tavistock,

Lord Londonderry, and so on. T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence of Arabia is attracted by us. He actually writes to the secretary of the January Club, and he says, I'm really keen on your movement. I wish you well. I'm just not ready to join it myself. I think it's exactly the kind of thing that would have appealed to Lawrence.

Romantic, dashing. Romantic, action, the young generation, all that stuff. Now, you mentioned press magnates. At this point, the British Union of Fascists does get admiring press coverage from, for example, the Rothermere organisation. So that is the Daily Mail or the Sunday Despatch. So the most famous instance of this, which I'm going to bring it up because I'm sure you will bring it up, Tom, and it's one that you see on social media all the time, is in

January 1934 when Lord Rothermere writes this opinion piece called Hurrah for the Black Shirts. And this is constantly being wheeled out. And he is backing the Black Shirts partly because, well, so Martin Pugh in his book Hurrah for the Black Shirts describes him as the most influential single propagandist for fascism between the wars. Now, I don't know whether you would agree with that judgment. But just to reiterate that at this point, fascism does not mean what it has connotations it has for us. So I know that this is always used as a stick with which to beat the Daily Mail today. But there is a sense in which Lord Rothermere can back the black shirts because he's a massive reactionary, clearly, but also because he's a highly commercial newspaper magnate and he can see that there is a market here. So he's backing it not just because it's

coming from his political convictions, but because he feels that he can make a profit from it. Would that be fair? I'm not sure that actually the profit motive is actually that important. I think actually, so Lord Rotherman had lost, I think, two of his sons in the First World War. He undoubtedly is on the right of British politics. And I mean, his papers have always been on the right of British politics, always very pro-empire, patriotic, worried about Bolshevism, all of that sort of stuff. I think he is absolutely, I don't think he's an outlier necessarily. I think he is a very good example of a lot of people that would include Winston Churchill, let's say, and indeed lots of conservative MPs, indeed some people in the

Labour Party as well, who are transfixed by the fear of communism and Bolshevism, who basically see it lurking as a spectre. I mean, not unreasonably, by the way, because an awful lot of people have died in the Soviet Union Union who think anything is better, any shield, any sword against this terrible menace. I mean, this is what Churchill is saying again and again about Mussolini, of course, in the 1920s. Anything is better than that. And of course, as you say, they don't know what we now know. Right. So that sense that reactionaries, conservatives, people who are very, very anxious about the threat of Bolshevism, that they can use the fascists as a shield. The Italian ambassador, Count Grandi,

to London, he makes this point to Mosey. He notes that, and I'm quoting Martin Pugh here, that in Italy, reactionaries like Rothermere had intended to harness fascism to defeat socialism and democracy, thereby establishing themselves in power, but realised too late that they had opened the way to a real revolution in government rather than to a consolidation of the right wing. Is the Italian ambassador's take on what is happening with Rothermere's support for the fascists? I think the question that people always ask, or the emphasis that people place, is probably wrong. So people say, sort of, gosh, look at this, Isn't this shocking? Ha, ha, ha, kind of thing. Actually, the interesting thing that happens in Britain is that the people who you might expect

to be sympathetic to that movement withdraw their support quite quickly. Including Lord Rothermere. Yeah, exactly. Lord Rothermere withdrawing his support. So that doesn't happen in Germany or in Italy. And there's one particular moment that explains why that happens, which is one of the great sort of landmark dates in the history of the British fascist movement, which is on the 7th of June, 1934, the meeting and the violence at Olympia. So Olympia is in, where is it, it's in Kensington, isn't it? Yes. Huge kind of arena, kind of exhibition space, I guess. They're always kind of ideal home exhibitions and things like that taking place in

Olympia. And that evening on the 7th of June, 2,000 black shirts in total, in two kind of groups, marched through the streets. The biggest group sets off from the King's Road in Chelsea, marches through the streets, a great public spectacle to Olympia.

There's a huge crowd outside of counter-demonstrators. By the way, the existence of the counter-demonstrators does slightly make you think, okay, this isn't just, okay, people don't know what we now know, but there are lots of people at the time who think this is not on. There is something pernicious and poisonous about fascism. A lot of those counter-demonstrators, of course, would be communists or trade unionists and things. But there is a sense that fascism is unusual, that there is some toxicity to it. So on trade unions, does Moseley want to abolish trade unions like Mussolini's done? He would make them guilds.

Oh, medieval guilds. Yes, they love their medieval guilds, don't they? Yeah. So the fascists, anyway, there's a bit of argy-bargy outside. They get inside the great Olympia space. There are thousands of people there, 12,000 people in the audience, including, and this is a fascinating thing, 150 MPs. So I'm guessing most of them. All conservative. No, not all conservative. Most of them conservative, I think.

The vast majority conservative. And there are dozens and dozens and dozens of society people, aristocrats, Lady this, Sir Horace that, the Earl of whatever, the Marquess of this. They're all there because they are Mosley's friends, they're his class, they're his people. And they actually probably sympathize with a lot of this. Let's fight off, let's have a fresh start. Let's get rid of all this democratic flapper rubbish. Let's get rid of communism, all that. They're all flags. I mean, it's an amazing spectacle. It's a spectacle on a scale that has never been seen in Britain,

in politics, with floodlights. I mean, everybody comments on the loudspeakers, massive, overpowering loudspeakers, Moses' voice echoing through the hall, the theatricality that we would associate with Goebbels, Tom. So the artists, of course, have been in power for a year now. Yeah. But the stagecraft is Hitler, isn't it? The stagecraft, exactly. Exactly.

But what happens at this meeting is right from the start, he's being heckled. Now, the communists had a history of, they had a track record of heckling in this way. In the debate in the House of Commons that follows this, Clement Attlee says, I think the communists have disrupted this deliberately. They do it to me all the time. So this is standard. He blames communists for it. But every time there's a heckle mostly stop speaking the searchlights are trained on the heckler and then a group of black

shirts will identify the heckler and beat him up there and then these are the the biff boys well these are much worse than the biff boy the biff boys were working for the new party these people are you know william joyce the future lord haw haw who we've talked about about. So they're kind of knuckle dusters and truncheons. Knuckle dusters, yeah, plastic truncheons. They will just kick you on the ground again and again. So like the Nazis in Germany. Exactly. The brown shirt.

Now, some observers, it's really interesting, some of the observers, including some of the Conservative MPs, are horrified by this. And some Conservative MPs actually write a letter to the Times. One Conservative MP, Geoffrey Lloyd, I saw things at Olympia that made my blood boil as an Englishman and as a Tory. So there is a sense that this has crossed a line. Martin Pugh in his book, Hurrah for the Black Shirt, says he wonders how many of the people making these claims are actually Baldwin loyalists. And actually, they had always been fighting at British election meetings, going right back to the 19th century and did the 18th century.

But what you don't do is shine spotlights on them. Exactly. I mean, usually it's happening on the margins. People don't want to talk about it because it's embarrassing. If you put a massive great spotlight so that everyone can see the bully boys beating up the protesters, then you're making a statement about your relationship to violence, aren't you? You're foregrounding it. Yeah. Could not agree with you more. I think that's absolutely right. I think, I was just thinking what a good point it was. I just thought it was a really good point. That of course it's different. If it's a liberal conservative election in the heyday of Gladstone

and Israeli, drink has been taken in Markets, Snodsbury. There's rowdyism on the fringes of the meeting as Ned whatever is having a punch up with Horace so-and-so. They're shouting about tariffs at each other or whatever. Church disestablishment. That's one thing. And no one would say Gladstone has willed this. This is part of Gladstone's credo. But Mosley, not only did he train the spotlight on it, but his whole credo of action and dynamism- And strength. And strength and aggression. And non-parliamentary rule.

Exactly. And I think there are different... Some people say Moseley might have lost control. Some people say he encourages a deliberate overreaction. I think it's perfectly plausible that he encourages a deliberate overreaction because Moseley's rhetoric is so aggressive. I'm sure he said, let's make an example of them. It will inspire people to join our movement,

all this kind of thing. But the furore, I think, is very damaging for Moseley. And this is what completely loses him the support of Lord Rothermere and of much of the press. So Lord Rothermere withdraws all the support of his newspapers from the BUF. He says, this has crossed a line. Now, some people say, well, he only cared about his advertisers. I'm not sure that's quite right. I think Rothermere wrote to Mosley and he said, I've noticed that there's more and more anti-Semitism in your movements and I cannot support that. But also, I think the timing is really important.

Olympia happened on the 6th of June, 1934. On the 30th of June, it's the Night of the Long Knives in Germany, when Hitler massacres part of his own movement. That's the first, you know, for a lot of people who've been watching Hitler with interest and not necessarily with open hostility. They're very shocked by the violence, the bloodshed of the Knights of the Long Knives. And I think the coincidence of those two things means that a lot of establishment kind of Tory-ish people in Britain think, whoa, we can't have anything like this in Britain. This is absolutely crossing a line. And so actually, having attracted tens of thousands of members earlier, by the end of 1934, Mosley has lost the support of the press and he's lost loads of members. The membership is falling and his crowds are... He has a meeting in White City. His next big meeting is in White City and he gets only 3,000 people.

They are outnumbered at least 20, maybe even 50 to one by crowds of counter-demonstrators. I would argue at that point, by crossing that line into violence at Olympia, he has actually already torpedoed any attempt to present his organization as a serious, respectable party of government. Martin Pugh quotes the numbers of the British Union of Fascists, that it was 40,000 to 50,000 in 1934, and it's 5,000 by 1935. Yeah. But even those figures in 1934 aren't that big. No, but don't forget most people, I mean, most political party membership in Britain

is greatly inflated in the interwar years anyway. So most of the people who are Labour Party members are actually members because they're members of trade unions, not because they're suffused with excitement. We're doing four episodes on British fascists, so I don't want to say they're unimportant. It's a bit late now, Tom. But I mean, just to emphasise that actually, I mean, it is still a very peripheral movement. Peripheral but eye-catching. Peripheral but eye-catching. And in our third episode, we will look at a particularly eye-catching incident, an incident that still has reverberations in British politics right the way up to the present day, which is the Battle of Cable Street in the East End. Very, very mythologised episode and definitely keeps the fascists in the public eye. So we will be back with that next week,

unless, of course, you are a member of the Restless History Club, in which case you can hear it straight away, and also our fourth episode, which will be on the Mitfords. Yeah, Tom, I thought you were selling yourself short there, because you basically are doing three episodes. I'm not going to say you're doing them under duress. You're doing them with great enthusiasm, and Gusto, making some very astute points,

as we've already established. But as farress you're doing them with great enthusiasm and gusto and making some very astute points as we've already established but as far as you're concerned these three episodes are but a warm-up oh dear for the episode that you want to do about the mitt which you've been talking about since the beginning of the podcast and which i'm sad to say has been met by some skepticism by your co-presenter um about the mittford's but yes i'm so excited that i'm going to be proved wrong i can't wait and if you remember the rest is history club get stuck in listen to me being proved wrong right now you will be proved wrong you will definitely be proved wrong the mitfords are a fascinating subject uh and you can't possibly do a series on british fascists without mentioning well

diana in unity i've heard you made that point about uh 500 times off air so we will see you all next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early