Stephen Dorril
London: Viking, 2006, £30
In his 1975 biography of Oswald Mosley, Robert (now Lord) Skidelsky very much celebrated the old fascist on his own terms, contributing, wittingly or not, to his attempted rehabilitation. Mosley, we were told in all seriousness, was always driven by his concern for ordinary people and a desire to improve their lives. His ambitions were always honourable, but unfortunately he was mistaken in the way he set about trying to realise them. His embrace of Fascism when he formed the British Union of Fascists (BUF) put him beyond the pale. This, according to Skidelsky, was little short of a tragedy because it deprived the country of the services of a man of immense talent and ability. Skidelsky is considerably more critical of Mosley for wasting his talent than he is of him for actually donning the blackshirt and allying himself with Mussolini and Hitler. Indeed, at times he seems to regard him as more of an English eccentric than a real fascist. Even when it comes to Mosley’s embrace of anti-Semitism, Skidelsky quite incredibly argues that British Jews were at least partly responsible for this themselves because of their hostile reaction to his fascism! Most hilariously, Skidelsky actually argues that, in the event of a Nazi victory, if Mosley had collaborated, he would have been no more a traitor than Konrad Adenauer was for collaborating with the Allies after 1945. Skidelsky does not really seem to have grasped the enormity of Nazism. For just about anyone else a better comparison than with Adenauer would have been with Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian fascist and collaborator, who was executed at the end of the War.
What is really quite astonishing is that Skidelsky’s travesty has remained the standard biography of Mosley until now. Stephen Dorril’s hefty new study, Blackshirt, supersedes it in every way. Indeed, Dorril actually writes of how when he read Skidelsky’s biography back in the 1970s, he had been ‘deeply shocked by its sympathetic view of its subject and quite astonishing defence of Mosley’s turn to fascism and anti-Semitism’. He has decisively remedied this situation, relegating Skidelsky’s volume to a well-deserved academic limbo.
What of the old fascist himself? Mosley had an undistinguished First World War. According to his son, Nicholas, this always rankled: he ‘had seen little active combat, and this played on his mind’. His subsequent entry into the House of Commons as a Conservative MP owed considerably less to his war record than it did to his affairs with the wives of prominent Tories and the connections and contacts this provided. What is interesting is Mosley’s decision, once in the House, to position himself on the left. He played an important part in the opposition to the Lloyd George Coalition’s Irish policy, in particular the so-called ‘reprisals’ policy with its murder squads and house-burnings. And then he joined the Labour Party. The eagerness with which the Labour Party, including the party at constituency level, welcomed this upper class convert and his wife with their country estate, conspicuous wealth and domestic servants still comes as something of a surprise. Not just Mosley, but his wife, Cynthia, the daughter of Lord Curzon, was also immensely popular with the party’s rank and file. She too became a Labour MP! They were not parachuted into working class constituencies as would happen today, but were welcomed enthusiastically. This deference towards ‘one’s betters’ is, of course, one of the reasons why the Labour Party has made so little impression on the British political and social structure over the last hundred years, so that Britain is still a monarchy with a House of Lords, public schools, Oxbridge and all the rest of the paraphernalia of the traditional upper class. Nevertheless, to his credit, Mosley played a very active role in the General Strike in 1926 and even more impressively in supporting the miners in the subsequent six months Lockout. He became particularly friendly with the militant miners’ leader, Arthur Cook. Mosley cultivated both the Labour left and the party’s leader, James Ramsay Macdonald, and certainly seems to have seen Labour as his political home.
What transformed Mosley from a successful rising Labour politician, perhaps a future leader of the party (although personally I am rather dubious of this) into an unsuccessful fascist and political pariah? There are four factors involved: the financial and economic crisis of 1929-31; the Labour government’s failure to cope with it; the success of the Nazis in Germany; and his own overweening ambition and self-regard. These combined to lead him into one of the great political misjudgements of twentieth century British politics. Mosley actually believed that economic collapse made the fascist tide irresistible and he determined to ride it to power in Britain. Only Fascism could make Britain strong again and this was his destiny. What this involved, as he himself admitted, was a reversion to type, an embrace of authoritarianism.
While Dorril’s psychologising is generally unconvincing, he nevertheless provides an essential account of Mosley’s break with Labour, of his New Party and of the founding of the BUF. Quite rightly he has no time at all for the attempts by Mosley himself, by Skidelsky or anyone else, to distance him from the BUF’s anti-Semitism. Mosley ‘vetted’ all BUF publications and personally agreed to every anti-Semitic slander, lie and smear. But to no avail. The BUF remained one of the least successful of Europe’s fascist movements. Despite its campaign of anti-Semitism in the East End of London, the fact remains, as Dorril points out, that the BUF could not elect a single councillor, let alone an MP. Its highest vote was in Bethnal Green in March 1937 when a BUF council candidate got 23% of the vote. From this point of view, the role of anti-Semitism has to be seen as less one of mobilising popular support than of actually providing the cement holding the BUF itself together; and, moreover, providing Mosley with an excuse for his failure to overturn British politics. Mosley had confidently believed that the scale of the economic crisis in Britain would bring down the British political system as it had the Weimar Republic in Germany. The Conservative establishment would be forced to turn to his Blackshirts to protect them from a working class radicalised by economic collapse. He was convinced that the BUF would be able to emulate the Nazis and rise to a position of political domination almost overnight. If a comparative nonentity like Corporal Hitler could do it, then what could a man of Mosley’s superior abilities accomplish? Later, in his autobiography, Mosley put his failure down to the fact that the economic crisis in Britain was not deep or prolonged enough; but this was the benefit of hindsight. At the time, rather than acknowledge the scale of his misjudgement, Mosley took comfort in blaming his failure on the hidden power of the Jews. Far from being a reluctant anti-Semite, Mosley wholeheartedly embraced the politics of the pogrom. There can be no doubt that if Britain had surrendered during the Second World War and Mosley had become a member of a collaborationist government, he would have been an accomplice in the Holocaust.
Dorril does a particular service in establishing the extent to which the BUF was financially dependent on foreign subsidies, first from Mussolini and later, to a much lesser extent, from Hitler. His Italian subsidy amounted to £234,730, or some £8 million in today’s money. Without this enormous subvention, the BUF would barely have existed and Dorril’s findings in this respect will inevitably force much rethinking of the history of British Fascism in the 1930s. The Nazis provided much smaller amounts. One remarkable episode that Dorril uncovers is the financial gain that Mosley made by acting as an intermediary, helping to secure the release of the Austrian Rothschilds, who were in the hands of the Gestapo. The BUF received a share of £40,000 for its part in this shameful extortion. Anti-Semitism could be profitable.
Blackshirt is also very good on the activities of the BUF and the far right in the run up to the outbreak of the Second World War and during the early months of the conflict. Mosley himself was arrested and interned on 23 May 1940, along with many of his followers (at least those without powerful friends). His monstrous second wife, the appalling Hitler-lover, Diana Mosley, was arrested soon after. The controversy surrounding their release is usefully chronicled together with the subsequent revival of fascist activity. Once again, Dorril is particularly impressive in chronicling Mosley’s post-war activities, most notably his cultivation of international fascist connections. As far as the Mosleys, both husband and wife, were concerned, the problem with Hitler was more that he had discredited the fascist cause than that he had attempted genocide.
What of the book’s weaknesses? First of all, the sheer amount of material that Dorril marshals is sometimes overwhelming, so that the argument gets lost in the detail. This fault is compounded by the fact that the book is poorly organised and for someone coming new to the subject this is likely to be confusing. Moreover, it is not really acceptable for a book that relies so heavily on new material and new sources to be without references. They are, as Dorril tells us, available at his website, but this is not good enough. One supposes reasons of space were the responsible for this; but if that is the case, then for my money the work should either have appeared in two volumes (my preference) or the text should have been cut. Dorril’s treatment of the BUF would also have benefited from more comparison with other European fascisms. While he acknowledges the BUF’s weakness, indeed makes clear that it was even weaker than this reader thought and more reliant on Italian money, he does not really devote enough effort to explaining this. The book, it has to be said, comes across as theoretically impoverished compared to other recent publications in the field. This might lessen its impact, which will be a great shame, because despite its faults, Dorril has written an important book that deserves to be widely read and to be on public and university library shelves throughout the country.