Oswald Mosley
There's a good book review on Oswald Mosley in the LRB (by Ferdinand Mount). It's subscription only, but here are some excerpts:F.E. Smith, another unscrupulous chancer whom Mosley idolised, called him ‘the perfumed popinjay of scented boudoirs’.
Spode (PG Wodehouse's character based on Mosley), a huge man with piercing eyes and a moustache, can be brought to heel by the mention of the word ‘Eulalie’, because in private life he designs ladies’ underwear under the name of Eulalie Soeurs. Mosley, it turns out, had a plan for a range of Blackshirt cosmetics which were to be marketed on a commercial radio station secretly controlled by himself.
But only a year later again he was telling Bruce Lockhart that his new organisation was to be ‘on the Hitler group system: members to wear grey shirts and flannel trousers. Storm troops: black shirts and grey bags.’ ‘You must be mad,’ Harold Macmillan told him when he heard the news. ‘Whenever the British feel strongly about anything, they wear grey flannel trousers and tweed jackets.’ Or that is what Supermac later said he said: he was rather anxious to make light of his own dabblings with the New Party.
Mount's conclusion from the two books under review is that Mosley was basically Hiter-ite or -lite in his policies and hatred of Jews (and who was funded by either Mussoline or Goebbels), and other biographers have tried to hard to excuse parts of his life; however he never came anywhere near power and fascism really wasn't a British thing.
posted by Matthew @ 7/03/2006 06:58:00 AM
Comments: 0
