Rodney Atkinson and Toby Horton
Oswald Mosley, like many Britons fascinated by Hitler’s Nazism and Mussolini’s Fascism during the 1930s, was socially well connected. He was a Conservative MP, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster under a Labour Government and (after his return from Mussolini’s Italy as a convinced corporatist and fascist) had the support of Conservatives like the future Conservative Prime Minister and euro-fanatic Harald MacMillan and the future Labour Cabinet Minister Aneurin Bevan.
The typical corporatist and fascist is a “third way” politician. When the left move right (see Tony Blair) and the right move left (see John Major) they meet in corporatism. In Oswald Mosley we have both movements in one man!
Mosley was married to Lady Cynthia Curzon the second daughter of Earl Curzon in the Chapel Royal with George V and Queen Mary in attendance! After Cynthia died in 1933, Mosley married his mistress Diana Guinness nee Mitford (1910–2003). They married in secret in Germany on 6 October 1936 in the Berlin home of Hitler’s Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels – Goering was one of the guests.
He was admired by the future Labour Cabinet Minister Richard Crossman (“Mosley was spurned by Whitehall, Fleet Street and every party leader at Westminster simply and solely because he was right”) and the future and disastrous leader of the Labour Party Michael Foot referred to his “political Genius” while that most corrupt of all our Prime Ministers, the Liberal David Lloyd George (who so admired Hitler) called him a “man of remarkable lucidity and force”.
Mosley resigned as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1930 because his policies were too radical (opposed free trade, sought high trade tariffs, the nationalisation of the main industries and a programme of public works) Colonel Joseph Wedgwood of the Labour Party, later a Father of the House, said after Mosley’s resignation speech: “I watched the Liberal Party. I watched the Conservative Party. Man after man was saying to himself: ‘That is our leader.’ ”
Mosley formed the British Union of Fascists (including the notorious blackshirts) in 1932. The BUF was proscribed during the war and Mosley and his wife Diana were imprisoned. After the war Mosley formed the Union Movement, which called for a single nation-state to cover the continent of Europe (known as Europe a Nation) and later attempted to launch a National Party of Europe to this end. He published a magazine The European and he would undoubtedly be delighted today with “the country called Europe” as the European Union calls itself. It is collectives of capital and labour and the all powerful supranational State within the corporatism (so beloved of Mosley’s hero Mussolini) which now dominate Europe.
My good friend Toby Horton, formerly Chairman of William Hague’s constituency in Richmond, and recently the UKIP candidate in Thirsk and Malton had personal contact with Mosley in 1970. It is both fascinating and valuable to read of Toby’s observation of and conversation with Mosley – a man so reviled by most but so praised (as is his European project today) by the British political Establishment.
TOBY HORTON:
Edward Heath’s government deceived the electorate when it claimed that, to trade with Europe, we had to be part of a political union. With the EU referendum now looming, the time has come to explore the roots of this whole dysfunctional project.
Now, it needs to be recognised that one important strand was the Europe a Nation movement, begun in the 1950’s by Sir Oswald Mosley and his wife Diana, one of the fabled Mitford sisters. After their failure with the British Union of Fascists and incarceration in Holloway Prison during the Second World War, they moved to Ireland and then to France. There they launched “The European” magazine, which formed part of their Europe a Nation movement. Following Germany’s defeat, they claimed that the nations of Europe should be subsumed into a European entity but still run on pre-war corporatist lines with governments and large corporations colluding for their mutual benefit. Free trade should be opposed at every turn in favour of economic micro-management, which effectively is what we have now 70 years after the end of the War. And if you think that this is all old hat, I suggest that you google www.oswaldmosley.com and look up Europe a Nation. There you will see that the “Oswald Mosley Directorate” and “The Friends of Oswald Mosley” are still hard at work, with their project now in sight of its final fulfilment.
And looking back after 45 years or so I recall a surreal private dinner to which I was invited to meet the Mosleys in, I think, 1970. My hosts were generous, cultivated people of the very sort to be dazzled by their charisma, as so many were in the 1930’s. As a young man, what struck me most about them was their eyes, his dilating with intensity, hers completely motionless and with the colour of cornflowers. The conversation was bizarre as he exclaimed, “There have been three great men in my lifetime, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Hitler I knew, Stalin I met and it is a great sorrow to me never to have known Mao.” Then Diana Mosley spoke of their wedding in Berlin in 1936 declaring, “We were married in Goebbels’ drawing room. Goering was our best man. He wore a powder blue uniform. The Fuehrer could not be there but we called on him the next day.”
Then they spoke of our common European destiny, of the new Europe that was in the making and how vital it was the Britain should play a leading part in it. Mosley had written about it in his 1947 book “The Alternative” and had sought to build a National Party of Europe. Two years later Edward Heath achieved his, and their, goal.
At the end of the evening, I drove them back to the Ritz Hotel where they were staying. They talked more about our shared European destiny. After saying goodbye to them I felt distinctly queazy, to put it mildly, just as I have always felt queazy about the whole European project. What used to be called English liberty is a precious trust, to be nurtured and protected, and the memory of that evening has always stayed with me as compelling evidence of this!
