The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family (22 page)

The eldest of three sons, Mosley came from a similar background to Diana’s. He graduated from Sandhurst on the outbreak of the First World War at the age of seventeen. He served gallantly in the trenches and in the air, but was badly injured in a landing accident and was invalided out of the forces, with a pronounced limp, before he was twenty. With a military career denied to him he turned to politics and was elected Conservative MP for Harrow in the so-called ‘khaki election’ of 1918, becoming the youngest member of the Commons. Thus began his meteoric rise. Confident, rich, darkly good-looking, he was over six feet tall and athletic: he rode well, played tennis and fenced at international level. Above all, he was charismatic; he excelled in debate and was a polished performer on the hustings. In those pre-television days political meetings were attended in numbers only dreamed of by present-day politicians and he thought nothing of addressing a crowd of thousands. With his impassioned speeches, delivered in a powerful, if unusually pitched, voice he found it easy to carry his audience with him when he called for political reform to ‘get the unemployed back to work’. His speeches were as full of stirring phrases as were Churchill’s: ‘. . . the tents of ease are struck, and the soul of man is once more on the move’ and ‘Supposing people had stood on the shore when Drake and Ralegh . . . set out to sea and said, “Don’t go. The sea is very rough and there will be trouble at the other end . . .”’
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During the 1931 election the
Manchester Guardian
wrote:

When Sir Oswald Mosley sat down after his Free Trade Hall speech in Manchester and the audience, stirred as an audience rarely is, rose and swept a storm of applause towards the platform – who could doubt that here was one of those root-and-branch men who have been thrown up from time to time in the religious, political and business story of England.
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Two years after being elected, impatient for office and disillusioned by, among other things, Conservative inactivity to help former servicemen, Mosley crossed the floor of the Commons and joined the Labour Party. Nine years later, still only in his early thirties, he was made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in Ramsay MacDonald’s government, and was one of a quartet of ministers given responsibility for dealing with unemployment, which had then reached the unheard-of level of two and a half million. The memorandum he produced on the subject was described several decades later by a political pundit as ‘brilliant . . . a whole generation ahead of Labour thinking’,
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but his recommendations were rejected, and in May 1930 he resigned in protest, ‘slamming the door with a bang to resound through the political world’. It was, wrote one respected political commentator, ‘an amazing act of arrogance’.
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Frank Pakenham met Mosley at a dinner party at the Astors’ house, Cliveden, soon afterwards. ‘It was a Conservative household but they entertained politicians of all persuasions there,’ he said. ‘I sat next to Tom [Mosley] and he looked at me with that odd look with which he seemed to transfix women . . . he had very dark, mesmeric eyes. Anyway, he said to me, “After Peel comes Disraeli. After Baldwin and MacDonald comes . . .?” And he left the question hanging in the air. “Who comes next?” I asked him. “Comes someone very different,” he growled.’
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At this point Mosley had reached the pinnacle of his career in conventional British politics. ‘He had become a major political personality in his own right,’ his biography stated, ‘with a wide, and almost unique, range of support and goodwill across the political spectrum.’ Churchill himself proposed Mosley for membership to the Other Club, which Churchill had founded with F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, in 1911, as a dining club for men prominent in political life. Shortly after Mosley’s resignation from the Labour Party, the government fell, caught by the effects of the world depression. Mosley could easily have gone back to the Conservative Party and they would have welcomed him, but he could see no radical thinking there, and a radical solution was – he insisted – the only way to deal with the worsening economic situation.
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Instead, he charted a courageous course. Prompted by George Bernard Shaw, and with the financial backing of Sir William Morris (later Lord Nuffield), who donated fifty thousand pounds, he formed his own party, which he called, rather unimaginatively, the New Party, and campaigned in the 1931 election. The result was a Tory landslide. Not one New Party candidate was elected and Mosley lost his own parliamentary seat. The handful of notables who had supported him, such as Oliver Baldwin, Harold Nicholson, John Strachey and Alan Young, quickly faded away, but Mosley was far from defeated. Over the next twelve months the New Party evolved into the British Union of Fascists (BUF), which was officially launched on 1 October 1932. It proposed a totalitarian concept of government, uniforms for its active members, and support of European Fascist parties, although Mosley was nothing if not strongly nationalistic.

There is an informed and objective portrait of Mosley during this period. At the request of a favourite aunt, James Lees-Milne spent a fortnight during the election canvassing and performing menial tasks for Oswald Mosley’s party. What he saw of Mosley, from his subordinate position, made Lees-Milne uneasy: ‘He was in those days a man of overweening egotism. He did not know the meaning of humility. He brooked no argument, would accept no advice. He was overbearing and over-confident. He had in him the stuff of which zealots are made. His eyes flashed fire, dilated and contracted like a mesmerist’s. His voice rose and fell in hypnotic cadences. He was madly in love with his own words,’ Lees-Milne concluded, after noting ‘. . . the posturing, the grimacing, the switching on and off of those gleaming teeth and the overall swashbuckling’. This was written many years later when Mosley was in a political wilderness, and Lees-Milne added, ‘I believe Mosley is no longer like this. He has acquired tolerance and wisdom which, had he only cultivated them forty years ago, might have made him into a great moral leader.’
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A number of people made similar observations to me while I was researching this book.

Mosley continued to campaign with his ideas at public meetings and paid ministerial-style visits to Mussolini. Unlike the two main parties, the BUF had no major newspaper as a platform, although initially Lord Rothermere’s
Daily Mail
gave Mosley some limited support. His meetings were often rowdy, indeed he encouraged hecklers for he was so confident and clever that he found it easy to turn interruptions to his advantage. The
Daily Worker
printed constant encouragement to its readers to break up Mosley’s meetings, and as matters began to get out of hand, he appointed ‘bouncers’ from within his ranks of supporters. They rapidly evolved into silent and sinister-looking bullyboys, presenting BUF meetings in a light guaranteed to be unappealing to the average British voter. It is surprising that Mosley, with his political acumen, did not grasp that this was a major error of judgement.

From the start, once he struck out on his own, Mosley promoted Fascism as the answer to the global collapse of the economic order. Capitalism, he argued, had shown that it could not resolve the current problems of poverty and mass unemployment, while Bolshevism was to be avoided at all costs. Some of the horrors of the Bolshevik administration were known, though not by any means the true extent, and there was an undercurrent of fear among the upper classes and British middle-class Conservatives that the proletariat masses might seize power and ‘ruin’ the country. If one was to be radical in that period there were only two directions in which to travel, far right or far left: Fascism or Communism. It is important to recall that at that time Fascism, as a political model, was unmarred by the horrors we now associate with Nazism. Indeed, there was practical contemporary evidence in Europe that right-wing radicalism worked well, and did not necessarily lead to abuse of power.

Mussolini, whom Mosley admired, claimed that Fascism was the
only
alternative to Communism and, unlike the Bolsheviks, he did not seek to change the monarchy or the Church or confiscate private property. He seemed to offer action without revolution, and Mosley needed to point no further than Italy’s economic resurgence during the late twenties under Mussolini. In addition there were the exciting ideas of Adolf Hitler, the leading National Socialist in Germany, tipped as the next chancellor. What he had done in Germany was apparently a miracle: he had taken a nation with five million unemployed and put men to work building roads and factories. To the British voter Mosley might have had extreme ideas, but he was then untouched by the bogeyman image that history has since applied.

In Mosley’s book
The Greater Britain
, upon which he was working when he and Diana met and which he published a few months later through the BUF press, he unashamedly advocated totalitarian government: freedom for the individual but within complete state control; a democratically elected government headed by an authoritarian leader, who, he insisted, could not be described as a dictator as long as an elected parliament retained the power to dismiss the government. Unlike Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
, in which Jews are specifically mentioned as the enemy of the people, Mosley’s book made no reference to Jews but – paradoxically one might think upon the most cursory examination of his own lifestyle – he regarded decadence as the real adversary. His vision included a nation of citizens living ‘like athletes’, working wholeheartedly towards the common goal of a nation made great again, ‘shrinking from no effort and from no sacrifice to secure that mighty end’. The political commentator Beatrice Webb’s reaction was that he was merely imitating Hitler, whose policies were degraded because they followed primitive values ‘of blood lust, racial superstition, [and] blind obedience. As for Mosley,’ she wrote, ‘ he has not even Hitler’s respectable personal character nor Mussolini’s distinction . . . he [is] dissolute and unprincipled, without common sense in every sense of the word.’
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At this point Mosley had been married for twelve years to Cynthia ‘Cimmie’ Curzon, second daughter of Lord Curzon, a former viceroy of India and, during the war years and until his death in 1924, one of the outstanding figures in British political history. Mosley first saw Cimmie on Armistice Night in 1918 when, swathed in the Union Flag, the sweet-faced twenty-year-old had climbed on to one of the lions in Trafalgar Square to lead a rousing chorus of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. A year later they were formally introduced. Curzon was then Foreign Secretary, and though the wildly ambitious Mosley clearly fell in love with the personable and intelligent young woman, her father’s position, and her own personal wealth (through trusts settled on her by her millionaire American grandfather),
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undoubtedly affected his decision to marry her.

After a fashion the marriage worked well. Soon after their marriage, Cimmie, no slight politician herself, was elected Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent. When she was not pursuing her own career she was Mosley’s staunch supporter and campaigned strongly for him. They were an unlikely pair to represent socialism: members of the élite upper class, with a serious side to their lives but living an unashamedly luxurious and highly privileged lifestyle. Mosley made no secret of his ‘almost-unlimited appetite for fun’, and the single significant problem in the marriage was his sexual incontinence. Even prior to marrying Cimmie, he had a reputation as a womanizer, and his marriage vows did not change what was a virtual obsession. Cimmie soon learned about his serial affairs, and her misery was increased by his expectation that she accept them. As time went on she tried hard to ‘look the other way’, sometimes even bringing herself to tease him about it in her letters to him. The unwritten rules of upper-class society accepted that liaisons outside marriage were inevitable and, though regrettable, were allowable provided they were conducted with discretion. Divorce, of course, was unthinkable and amounted to social suicide.

Mosley was happy to abide by the rules and was usually reasonably discreet. His infidelities were trivial, he insisted to Cimmie, and would never affect the deep and meaningful love he felt for her. Their son Nicholas wrote that when his father met Diana he continued to love Cimmie deeply, though probably he had ceased to find her sexually attractive.
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Mosley’s London flat in Ebury Street, ostensibly necessary for his work, was by unspoken agreement off-limits to his wife. There seems to be a general belief that it consisted of a single palatial room with a large bed on a raised dais, and that it was clearly unsuitable as a place to entertain political contacts. However, Diana remembers that ‘The bed was upstairs and invisible from the big room, which had a sofa and chairs, and was very suitable for serious politicians to visit.’
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In that spring of 1932, when Mosley and Diana were falling in love, Cimmie had recently given birth, by Caesarean section, to her third child. She had not been in full health for over a year, suffering from a mild kidney infection after a fall but complaining over a prolonged period of backache, headaches, weight gain and a general malaise. Today such symptoms in an intelligent and apparently healthy young woman who appeared to have the world at her feet would immediately invite suspicion of an unacceptable level of stress.

In July 1932, a month after the birthday party at Cheyne Walk, Mosley attended a ball at Biddesden held by Diana to celebrate the end of Unity and Rudbin’s first season. There Unity met Mosley for the first time, and she, too, fell under his mesmeric influence, though for her it was an ideological surrender. He became her ideal of a political leader – indeed she referred to him thereafter as ‘The Leader’ – and her allegiance to Fascism became as deep, fulfilling and enduring as was Diana’s emotional attachment to Mosley.