Six, page 15
A young German journalist described Mosley’s appearance at a Labour Party meeting in London in 1924:
Suddenly there was a movement in the crowd and a young man with the face of the ruling class of Great Britain but with the gait of a Douglas Fairbanks thrust himself forward through the throng to the platform followed by a lady [Cimmie] in heavy, costly furs. There stood Oswald Mosley, whose later ascent was to be one of the strangest phenomena of the working class movement of the world...
The new man spoke... It was a hymn, an emotional appeal directed not to the intellect, but to the Socialist idea.
Here, then, was the great orator in action. At the end of speech, the crowd was described as beside itself, ‘in uproar; as at a boxing match, or a fair’.
Given this mass appeal, which reads uncomfortably like a Nuremberg en petit, it was unsurprising that there were those in Parliament who distrusted the dashing young Labour baronet. Mosley would look around at his fellow MPs with an air of disdain and pronounce: ‘A dead fish rots from the head down.’ Nevertheless, as Bob Boothby wrote to Cimmie: ‘I think your husband (damned Socialist though he is By God) will be Prime Minister for a very very long time, because he has the Divine Spark which is almost lost nowadays...’ He was indeed spoken of in these terms. Stanley Baldwin growled that ‘Tom Mosley is a cad and a wrong ’un’, but in 1929, when he was promoted to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster with the brief of tackling unemployment, it was Baldwin – and wary Labour men like Herbert Morrison – who seemed out of step.
The following year came the ‘Mosley Memorandum’: a manifesto for recovery that was subsequently described as both a generation ahead of its time and an alarming hint of tendencies to come. It combined Keynesian-style economics (for instance, unemployment to be dealt with in the short term by expensive road-building) with a plan for much stronger, indeed authoritarian executive powers. A large section of the Labour Party supported the Memorandum – although others thought it far too bold – and it was only narrowly defeated at the party conference in 1930. Typically, this spurred Mosley into irreversible action. He resigned from Labour, and in 1931 MacDonald formed a National Government. Effectively the party had been split, not exactly because of the Memorandum, but because of the divergent views that it exposed. Mosley, had he held on, would almost certainly have become Labour leader. His belief, however, was that he could bring his followers – who included Aneurin Bevan – to the New Party that he then formed. These events almost certainly explain the contempt that Diana later expressed for Ramsay MacDonald, and for the ‘Tory in all but name’ government that he led until 1935. (She often used her writings to settle old scores: for example Lady Diana Cooper’s husband Duff, who in 1923 described Mosley as a ‘canting, sliming, slobbering Bolshie [sic]’, was ripped to shreds thirty years on.9) Mosley was surely right in one thing: that more radical solutions were needed to the problem of unemployment, which stood at 2 million when he wrote the Memorandum, and would rise to 3 million by 1933. By then the New Party had evolved into the British Union of Fascists.
At the time of his first proper meeting with Diana, Mosley was in a limbo stage: out of Parliament, preparing for his next move, fatally available to pursue the goddess. The New Party had come and gone. In the 1931 election, all twenty-four of its candidates lost. James Lees-Milne had campaigned briefly for Mosley, although he was not really a convert. Years later he would recall his impressions of that time, and what he wrote is a fascinating indicator of the direction in which Mosley’s oratorical skills, his rock-star-like power to command an audience, were taking him. ‘He was in those days a man of overweening egotism... The posturing, the grimacing, the switching on and off of those gleaming teeth and the overall swashbuckling so purposeful and so calculated, were more likely to appeal to Mayfair flappers than to sway indigent workers in the Potteries.’ A previous supporter, Harold Nicolson, accompanied Mosley on a visit to Mussolini. He wrote: ‘He believes in fascism. I don’t.’ Yet Diana, who despite appearances was no Mayfair flapper, became convinced over the course of 1932 that Mosley was the man who could rescue Britain. ‘Occasionally we argued,’ she wrote. ‘But on the whole I was completely converted.’ She believed in his belief. And, as Mitfords did, she gave him a nickname: ‘The Leader’.
IV
On the evening of Unity’s dance at Cheyne Walk, at which Diana wore a grey tulle dress of surpassing beauty and quantities of diamonds, she and Mosley finally pledged themselves to each other. At the same time he told her that he would never leave Cimmie. What Diana thought about this, who knows, but she accepted it to the extent that she did not give him up. This arrogant, errant lover weighed heavier in the balance than her husband (who wrote her a letter, poignant in its formal understatement, asking her to stop ‘lunching’ with Mosley), her two sons, her remarkable perfect life. The following morning Mosley rang the house and, heedless of who had answered the phone, said to the maid: ‘Darling, when can I see you again?’
During this same key period – between the ball in July and the launch of the BUF in October – the Guinnesses held a fête champêtre at Biddesden. Diana was crowned with a silver wig made by Robert Byron, Mosley was all in black (no surprise there), and according to a guest at the party: ‘Diana was telling everyone how thrilling she found him, like having a crush on a film star.’ She was, of course, only twenty-two. To the painter Henry Lamb, whom she caught looking at Mosley askance, she said in her smiling, self-mocking way: ‘You’re thinking what a frightful bounder he is.’ Her own behaviour was careless. She and Mosley spent much of the evening upstairs inside the house. Cimmie, dressed meekly as a shepherdess, was apparently aware of what was happening: the loyal wife, who followed her husband’s politics like one of her imaginary lambs and had painstakingly made a banner for the BUF, was being cheated on by her hostess while most of those present pretended not to notice. What Bryan thought can only be imagined. But he cannot have been wholly amazed when, in November 1932, Diana told him that she wanted to leave. Whether he believed that she meant it is another story. On New Year’s Eve she walked calmly into a party held by Mosley and Cimmie, at which the two other Curzon sisters, spitting blood on behalf of all three of them, were also present. It was a quite extraordinary thing to do, possible only if one is young, indifferent and high on conviction. The following day she took a lease on a little house in Eaton Square, cut-price because of its poor condition but close to Mosley’s flat – ‘Bloody damnable cursed Ebury,’ said Cimmie, who for all her saintliness was a woman of passion, ‘how often does she come there?’ Diana set up home with her sons and four servants; she had, at a stroke, become a highly public and unabashed Other Woman.
From that moment the Mitford family began to fall apart. Unity and Jessica’s actions would be influenced by Diana’s nonpareil act of rebellion; the Redesdales would succumb to anger, shame and despair; Diana’s own life would be set on a course that led to vilification, pariah status and Holloway jail. The days when Nancy was a cause of concern for her daring novels and silly unrequited passion, when David fretted over money lost in a scheme to make plastic wireless covers – they would seem halcyon, unclouded. In 1935 a photographer would take the last in a long series of Mitford family portraits, but the people that it represented in it would go their separate ways the moment after the shutter had clicked. ‘I often think,’ wrote Nancy in The Pursuit of Love, ‘that there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.’
The Mitfords did not let Diana go without a fight. Knowing how much it would hurt, Sydney refused to allow Unity, Jessica and Deborah anywhere near their sister. David made common cause with Bryan’s father, now Lord Moyne, and together they visited Mosley at Ebury Street. Diana and Mosley were two of a kind, all right – the meeting would have led most men to cave in. Instead he merely told Randolph Churchill that he would wear a ‘balls protector’, and shrugged the whole thing off, saying: ‘Diana must be allowed to do what she wants.’ Even today Diana’s act would be viewed as calamitous, setting up alone as maîtresse en titre to London’s worst philanderer; an act of madness, walking out on a man who adored her, who had given her everything, to face a future of absolute uncertainty. In 1932, when even divorce was a stigma (worse yet, a bar to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot), open adultery of this kind was scandalous beyond comprehension. It was not the way things were done. One had affairs and kept the family show on the road. But Diana’s radicalism and refusal to tell lies extended, as it were instinctively, into the private sphere.
‘You are SO young to be getting in wrong with the world, if that’s what’s going to happen,’ wrote Nancy, sounding genuinely concerned for Diana and adding that she would always be on her sister’s side. Tom Mitford, whose opinion would ordinarily have counted most, also expressed horror: not least because Bryan was his good friend. Later he and his parents blamed Nancy for supporting Diana’s decision to leave her marriage. Tom also astutely remarked that £2,500 annual maintenance, which Bryan offered for life, would seem like nothing. It wasn’t a small sum, by any means, although after the near-infinite largesse of the past four years it was relative poverty. But Diana rather liked that idea, its purity and newness.
Cheyne Walk, so recently acquired, furnished with such care for every detail, was sold. ‘The servants are resenting you going so much,’ wrote Bryan, in a pathetic burst of ill-directed anger. It was typical of Diana that, having caused such incalculable unhappiness to her husband, she should then find him a flat in Chelsea and decorate it for him. ‘Darling, I really do think you are kind’, he wrote. ‘I do love you for it. I mean, I would if you wanted me to.’ In return he gave her the Cheyne Walk contents – including the two Aubusson carpets, a gift from her now enraged father-in-law – although she refused the Stanley Spencer, which was hung at Biddesden. She also returned the Guinness jewels. Lord Moyne urged his son to behave more like a man (Mosley?) and do something. Bryan’s response was to write more hopeless letters. ‘Are you positive that you love Tom more than me... You were my ewe lamb.’ This abject attitude hints, oh-so faintly, at a desire to induce guilt or regret. How could it not? Nobody could really have been as disinterestedly generous as Bryan, it was beyond nature, as Nancy suggested in a letter to Diana. Having seen Bryan in London, she wrote: ‘He was pretty spiky I thought, kept saying I suppose it’s my duty to take her back & balls of that sort.’ This was Nancy, of course, and therefore not entirely to be trusted. But it would be reassuring, really, to think that Bryan was insanely cross beneath all that decency.
Sydney Redesdale, wise beneath her detachment, wrote fine counsel to her daughter: ‘I was so glad I was able to see you the other night and to realize what I did think was the case: the affection you have for Bryan through and beyond everything. His worst fault seems to be a too great fondness for you and perhaps you on your side are too impatient. Do, I beg you, think well before you throw away what is worth while and good for what is nothing and bad.’
If anything could have stopped Diana, it was that letter. But the obduracy she had shown when she wanted to marry Bryan now returned, to the power of a hundred, and being told not to leave him made her all the more determined. Later she wrote: ‘In a strange way I think Kit and I both knew it was “pour la vie” and that we should always love each other.’
She was right: they did stay together. And is it so hard to understand why she fell for this man, who erupted into her life with the bounding force of Pilgrim the wolfhound?
Perhaps as much as anything she wanted freedom. Bryan was both perfect and entirely wrong for her. Devotion was something that she could command with too much ease to value it. Mosley represented the first real challenge she had ever encountered; he pursued her but he did not fall at her feet; he continued to live with his wife, to sleep with his sisters-in-law; in trying to prise him away from all this Diana had something to get her teeth into. Rather as rich aristocrats, for whom the world lay on a Sèvres plate, have historically hurled vast quantities of time and money at the thoroughbred racehorses that never quite did their bidding, so Diana remained intrigued by the mystery of her lover. And he would have been a proper lover. Our old friend sex played a huge part in all of this. Bryan was a very good-looking man, but the diffident young upper-classes are not noted for their Casanova qualities. Mosley brimmed with the particular confidence of the sexually successful; probably Diana had never met such a creature before he turned the full blast of his masculinity upon her. And a relationship that begins with irresistible physical attraction – unless this turns to repulsion – always retains something of that memory. One only has to look at photographs of the Mosleys in later life to understand that Diana fancied him until the day he died.
Again, the weight of history makes this seem barely comprehensible. Mosley became a demonized figure, a terrible symbol of authoritarianism, up to and beyond his death in 1980. Even pop culture used him as a kind of shorthand for all that must be resisted in politics: Elvis Costello’s first album in 1977 contained an attack on him – ‘calling Mr Oswald with the swastika tattoo’10 – that was not entirely accurate (Mosley was never a Nazi) but showed how, almost forty years after the threat he represented had been contained, he remained a uniquely powerful totem. ‘He loved Britain and has been waiting for its call,’ wrote Clive James in 1976, ‘all unawares that the best reason for loving Britain has always [to date] been its reluctance to call him, or anybody like him.’
In 1932, when Fascism meant Mussolini – with whom the British were quite comfortable, and who later helped fund the BUF11 – Mosley symbolized something different. Although the days were gone when he had been seen as a future prime minister (for the Conservatives, at first, as well as for Labour), he was not a political leper. He did not have the vast following that he wanted, but he could command serious support. ‘The origin of the BUF,’ he wrote, ‘was the formation of an emergency group of men and women to advocate a practical policy capable of being put into immediate operation in order to meet a specific plan for the crisis in Britain.’ And there was a crisis – financial panic, mass unemployment, the Communist threat: it was not as unreasonable as it now seems to portray democracy as too weak to cope. In the ten months between its inception and August 1933 the BUF expanded so quickly that it had to move to large premises on the King’s Road in Chelsea – the ‘Black House’ – which was said to be ‘filled with students eager to learn about this new, exciting crusade’.12 The party gathered together the various little strands of Fascism (such as the body that had abused Mosley back in 1927) that had been waving alluringly since the early 1920s. Even today it is apparent that Britain, for all its innate and healthy scepticism, has a weakness for people who spout solutions that they will never be called upon to enact: the mainstream is muddy with compromise, while those outside it can stand clean and clear, dangling the great glittering hypnotist’s tool that is ‘change’. This is the word that still holds its magic, and nobody promised it more than Mosley. Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail was behind the BUF until as late as 1934: ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ was a headline in January that year. The BUF was perceived as the party of ‘youth’. In other words, it embodied that other political shibboleth, the need to inspire young people, which always sounds so good and can lead to such extremes of idiocy. Lloyd George declared that ‘Sir Oswald Mosley is a very able man and he is making considerable headway.’ To the members of the Fabian Society, of all people, George Bernard Shaw made a speech, saying that Mosley ‘is a very interesting man to read just now... you instinctively hate him because you do not know where he will land you, and he evidently means to uproot some of you’.
The radicalism implied therein appealed to an agitator like Shaw, and to Diana. This is the unfathomable paradox within her: that she was a woman of the most intensely civilized values, a woman of profound humour, a woman who craved personal freedom, a woman who enjoyed without apology all the beauty that life could offer and that she herself embodied; and that she was, in her deepest soul, attracted to something dark, harsh, dictatorial and violent, something that above all took itself absolutely seriously. How, one wonders, did the Mitford love of laughter not cause her to fall about at the sight of Mosley in his black and his boots? Similarly – how could she have watched Hitler, screaming his nonsense at full volume, without the family sense of the ridiculous kicking in? Well: it didn’t.
Diana was not, like Miss Jean Brodie, ‘a born Fascist’. But that quality of will in her, the strong reverberating rod of steel inside her, responded to the same thing in Mosley. Over dinner, his son Nicholas recalled, he would offer his variation on the theories of Nietzsche. ‘And then he would do his trick of flashing his eyes on and off as if they were a lighthouse.’13 It is easy to think how incredibly silly this would have looked. Perhaps, as they say, one had to be there. Or one had to be receptive, to feel a quasi-religious faith in what Mosley called ‘the will to achievement’.
In her later writings, which are taut, rigorous and full of cogent arguments against ideas such as the rightfulness of going to war against Germany, Diana shows quite clearly the unyielding nature that would have responded to Mosley’s certainties. Reviewing a book about British politics in the years leading up to the Second World War, she wrote crisply: ‘For members of Parliament, to declare war on Germany was the answer to many things. All the great neglected problems of the day, unemployment, housing, poverty, were solved at a stroke... Oswald Mosley is denounced for predicting “collapse”, but he has unfortunately been proved right in the event.’14
This was the thing: Diana believed in Mosley. ‘It was this,’ she said, ‘which gave me the courage to survive ostracism, the anger of my parents... the disapproval of absolutely everyone.’ She fell in love with the man, not the ideology, but it was because he brought with him that unparalleled force of conviction, that charge of aggression with its sexual undertow, that she fell so heavily. It is not unknown: the response of pale protected girls to a mysterious male force is the stuff of the vampire myth, of romantic poetry, of laser-lit rock concerts. And Diana was, it must be reiterated, extremely young. Of course she stayed loyal to Mosley all her life but, had she been ten years older when she met him, she might have found him easier to resist. ‘You only do great things in a great way,’ he later said; to a girl who saw democracy as an innately compromised system, incapable of making things better, this would have sounded like a magnificent creed. And the kind of man who could say it was magnificent, also.
