The following evening, Tuesday, 21 May, 1940, M attended a meeting at the Home Office. Gathered round a table was his immediate superior in MI5, Guy Liddell, and the two most senior figures in the Home Office – the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, and the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, Sir Alexander Maxwell – as well as the head of the British Army, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke and, finally, the Director of MI5, Major-General Sir Vernon Kell. At an early stage the Home Secretary trotted out the line he had been using since the start of the war, namely, he felt there was no evidence that the British Fascists were prepared to assist the Germans if there was an invasion. He referred to an article by Sir Oswald Mosley in which the BUF leader had apparently ‘appealed to the patriotism of its members’.
At this point M intervened.
‘M. explained that this was merely an example of how insincere Mosley really was,’ recorded Liddell, ‘and how many of his supporters simply regarded utterances of that kind as a figure of speech.1 He then went on to describe something of the underground activities of the BUF and also of the recent case against Tyler Kent involving [Captain] Ramsay. Anderson agreed that the case against Ramsay was rather serious but he did not seem to think that it involved the BUF.’
At this point in the meeting, M could have agreed with the Home Secretary. It was the polite thing to do, the sensible thing to do and perhaps the most accurate thing to do. It was what the majority of his Fascist friends, past and present, would have done in his position, and it was probably what he himself might have chosen to do had a similar situation arisen several years earlier. The link between the BUF and the Kent-Wolkoff-Ramsay affair was tangential, not direct.
M chose otherwise. He pushed back against the Home Secretary. Using his intimate knowledge of the movement, he made the case in the strongest terms for the internment of all senior British Fascists, referring not only to the arrests of Kent and Wolkoff but to the list of Right Club members contained in the secret ledger. ‘M. explained to him [Anderson] that Maule Ramsay and Mosley were in constant touch with one another and that many members of the Right Club were also members of the BUF.’2
The meeting lasted just under two hours. ‘M. was extremely good,’ wrote Liddell, ‘and made all his points very quietly and forcibly.’
By the end of it, thought Liddell, Sir John Anderson was ‘considerably shaken’.3 ‘He asked us for further evidence on certain points which he required for the Cabinet meeting which was to take place tomorrow evening.’
That meeting was chaired by Churchill, who pushed for a new clause, 1a, to be added to the existing Regulation 18b of the Defence (General) Regulations 1939. This would allow for the detention without trial of any British citizen thought to pose a threat to national security as a result of their membership in an organisation that might be under foreign control or influence – such as the BUF, the Right Club or any other extremist right-wing group. This new clause was not put before Parliament but was approved by the Cabinet, including the Home Secretary, that same evening. No public announcement was made. This was to ensure an element of surprise when the arrests began, as they did the next day.
Over the next three months, Sir Oswald Mosley, Captain Ramsay and more than 1,000 senior British Fascists were arrested and imprisoned without trial. According to the Home Office, more than 700 of these men and women belonged to the BUF, an organisation that was soon outlawed by the Home Secretary. On the day that these arrests began, 23 May, 1940, Parliament also passed the Treachery Act, which made it easier for the death sentence to be delivered in cases of espionage or sabotage. Just four days later the Home Defence (Security) Executive was established to look into questions concerning the so-called Fifth Column.
Two weeks after that, in the wake of Dunkirk, Churchill dismissed MI5’s most senior officer, Sir Vernon Kell, who had been in charge of this department since its creation in 1909. His long-serving deputy, Sir Eric Holt-Wilson, resigned in protest. Part of the reason for Kell’s removal was that he had agreed too easily to the Home Office position on mass internment. With Kell and Holt-Wilson out of the picture, it was agreed at an MI5 board meeting that ‘our policy with regard to enemy aliens should be their wholesale internment followed by their removal from the country as and when this might become possible.4 Our object is to clear the ground as far as possible in the event of an invasion of this country.’ Very soon after, the British Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered the internment of all male enemy aliens between the ages of 18 and 70 years. By the end of July, as the Battle of Britain began and Hitler’s plans to invade Britain reached an advanced stage, roughly 27,000 Germans and Italians – for Italy was now at war with Britain – were detained in camps across England and some were sent to Canada and Australia.
Before considering the legality of this mass internment, of both homegrown Fascists and enemy aliens, or the question of whether it was justified, we should ask how this had come about.
‘It seems that the Prime Minister takes a strong view about the internment of all Fifth Columnists at this moment,’ wrote Liddell, shortly after the critical Cabinet meeting of 22 May, in which the key 1a clause was approved.5 ‘He has left the Home Secretary in no doubt about his views. What seems to have moved him more than anything was the Tyler Kent case.’
This last sentence is telling. The arrests of Kent and Wolkoff played a pivotal role in the decision to order mass internment. But why did Churchill know so much about this particular case? And for what reason did he imagine that it strengthened the case for having senior Fascists locked up, exactly as M had argued?
The answer appears to lie in the identity of the man who told Guy Liddell about the importance Churchill had attached to the Kent-Wolkoff case. This was the Prime Minister’s close friend and homme d’affaires: Desmond Morton.
Desmond Morton, the bad-tempered Old Etonian with the bullet lodged in his chest, M’s former spymaster at MI6, had become Churchill’s most trusted adviser on national security. Indeed, the head of MI6 was said to be ‘mortified’ by the extent to which Churchill now relied on Desmond Morton.6
Morton’s influence would wane, yet by May 1940 he was at the peak of his powers. Desmond Morton was the conduit between the Prime Minister and MI5 who was capable of exerting huge influence on Churchill regarding national security. At the same time, Morton remained a ‘great contact’ of M, ‘to whom he had direct access’.7
It is not a wild leap to imagine that as German forces poured into the Low Countries, M chose to bypass his superiors in MI5 and that he presented Morton with his own analysis of the threat posed by the BUF and the Right Club, and the need for mass internment of political extremists, and that Morton used this to lobby the Prime Minister. The way Churchill stressed the need for Communists and Fascists to be interned, in terms that M might have used, as early as 18 May, several days before the arrest of Wolkoff and Kent, only reinforces the idea that M was in touch with Morton and that his version of the situation was being passed on directly to Churchill.
It is also possible that this channel of communication accelerated the departure of Kell and Holt-Wilson. Just two days after they had gone, it was Desmond Morton who urged MI5 not to compromise with the Home Office as these two had done. M’s channel of communication with Morton would have underlined to the Prime Minister’s office the gulf between more hawkish MI5 officers such as Liddell and himself and the two elderly men at the helm.
Even if M had not been feeding information to Morton, his decision to synchronise the arrests of Kent and Wolkoff, his presentation of the case against them and his pressing of the Home Secretary for the mass internment of senior Fascists contributed decisively to the implementation of 18b(1a).
Beyond any doubt is the effect of this particular legislation on Fascism in Britain. Most of the senior Fascists who were interned during the war would be tarred for the rest of their lives by this detention. Although they were never tried, and their sentences were custodial rather than punitive, in postwar Britain the idea that they had done something that might have been treacherous or disloyal proved to be toxic.
When Neil Francis-Hawkins, a senior BUF figure, tried to return to his job at the Medical Supply Association shortly after the war, more than a hundred employees walked out in protest. He was forced to find work elsewhere. Many other Fascists had similar experiences. The Daily Worker and the Communist Party kept an eye on who was being released from detention, frequently calling for strikes if a Fascist was set to resume his or her pre-war job. Mosley was unable to successfully relaunch his political career after the war. Fascism was never again a legitimate voice in British politics. The wartime detention of so many senior figures after the introduction of 18b(1a) ensured the death of organised Fascism in Britain.
The origin of this legislation is easy to pin down: it was the moment in 1937 when MI5, using intelligence from M’s agents, pushed for an amendment to the War Book. This new clause proposed the internment of any British citizen thought to pose a threat to public safety or national security. The implementation of 18b(1a) three years later was realistic partly because of this earlier clause, also because the government already had details of who belonged to these extremist groups. Much of that intelligence had been patiently accumulated by MI5 and, in particular, by M Section. The end of British Fascism had been made possible by the diligent, selfless work of M’s agents, including Eric Roberts, E. G. Mandeville-Roe, Claud Sykes, John Hirst, Kathleen Tesch, Friedl Gaertner, Harold Kurtz, Vivian Hancock-Nunn, Jimmy Dickson, Hélène de Munck and Marjorie Mackie. Without their intelligence, gathered during thousands of hours of painstaking and often boring undercover work, it would have been extremely hard, perhaps impossible, to execute the order in May 1940 to detain all senior British Fascists.
Much of the credit should go to M. By running these agents, by presenting the Wolkoff-Kent case in the way that he did and, presumably, by lobbying Morton, he had played a key role in the introduction of the legislation that killed off British Fascism. The man who had helped to nurture this movement so soon after its birth in the 1920s had been instrumental in its demise. M had chosen his country over his friends, patriotism over personal loyalty and, by doing so, he had overcome his past.
In August 1940, M told a senior Fascist during a long interrogation that he had spent fifteen years getting to know the Communist and Fascist movements in Britain. ‘I’d like to impress on you one thing,’ said M.8 ‘I have no very particular biases one way or another.’ This was perhaps the first time in his life that Maxwell Knight had been able to say such a thing and to mean it, and for it to be true.