THE MAN DIANA met in February 1932 was fourteen years older than herself, one of the best-known politicians of the day and a notorious philanderer. Drive, vitality, intelligence of a high order, vision, energy and a delightful gaiety were immediately apparent on meeting him. His physical presence was magnetic: his striking good looks, which today seem those of a handsome cad, were cast in the Clark Gable mould. Indeed this film-star charisma was one reason for his success both as an orator and with women. Arrogant, impatient, ambitious, conscious of his physical appeal and exuding a rather brutal masculinity, he gave the overwhelming impression of a personality of immense strength who would stop at nothing to achieve what he wanted or to conquer a woman he desired. A greater contrast to Bryan Guinness could hardly be imagined.
In his earlier political career the lust for personal power that was later to be Mosley’s motivating force was not yet to the fore. An admirable idealism, combined with political talents, was bent towards bettering life for the poor. As for so many, his experiences in the First World War had left an indelible impression and he was determined to do everything he could to ensure that slaughter and devastation on such a scale never happened again. In the General Strike he (like Diana) had been on the side of the miners, championing their cause so fervently that he and his wife Cimmie became enormously popular speakers at miners’ galas. The Depression of the 1930s increased his determination to help the unemployed.
Like most born orators, Mosley was not afraid to show emotion. He had been biting and sarcastic in parliament, he could demolish a heckler with a brilliant riposte, but his audience was left in no doubt that he cared passionately – he could move himself to tears with his own speeches. But possibly his greatest gift, and the one which accounted for much of his appeal as a leader, was the ability to create in his hearers the sense that anything was possible. His best speeches produced an intoxicating euphoria that lifted his listeners with him and made his followers feel that a glorious future was there to be won.
Physically, he was magnificent, six feet two inches tall, upright, hard and fit. All his life he had taken strenuous exercise at least twice a week, chiefly fencing. His style of oratory was so physical that it demanded fitness – during the Ashton-under-Lyne by-election of the previous year Harold Nicolson described him as ‘an impassioned revivalist speaker, striding up and down the rather frail platform with great panther steps and gesticulating with a pointing, and occasionally a stabbing, index.’
His looks emphasised this dramatic pantherine quality: sleeked-back black hair and pencil moustache against a pale skin. Around him hung an aura of danger which served to challenge rather than frighten the worldly beauties he pursued. Like that earlier seducer, Lord Byron, he had a pronounced limp: his right leg was two inches shorter than the left and he had to wear a built-up shoe. Unless fencing, speech-making on a platform or, later, marching, he carried a walking stick or swordstick.
Most memorable were his eyes, dark, penetrating and seeming to look directly into the soul of the person to whom he was talking. Sometimes he would employ a curious trick of ‘flashing’ his eyes at a woman or an audience he was seeking to fascinate, suddenly dilating and then contracting the pupils (‘rather like car headlights being turned on and off’ was one description). His voice was sometimes melodic, sometimes harsh, but always hypnotic, able to whip up a platform audience with a frenzy of demagoguery or seduce a woman with its blend of unabashed desire and old-fashioned compliments.
Such a powerful personality stirred up extremes of feeling. In 1924 Beatrice Webb called him ‘the most brilliant man in the House of Commons . . . the perfect politician and the perfect gentleman . . . a Disraelian gentleman-democrat’, though by the time he was in government she was remarking more sharply, ‘That young man has too much aristocratic insolence in his make-up.’ His looks, his arrogance, his physical toughness and his uncompromising masculinity appealed strongly to many women, though Harold Nicolson’s wife Vita Sackville-West said that he gave her ‘the creeps’. The hot-tempered Duff Cooper described him as ‘an adulterous, ranting, slimy, slobbering Bolshie’.
Mosley was born on 16 November 1896, eldest of the three sons of the fifth baronet, Sir Oswald Mosley. Though christened Oswald Ernald, he was invariably known as Tom. His father was a wealthy landed squire; the Mosleys owned Ancoats in Lancashire, but from the late eighteenth century Rolleston, near Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire, had been the family seat. When Tom Mosley was five, his parents separated and he was brought up by his mother, who moved to Shropshire, and by his grandfather, the fourth baronet, at Rolleston.
Educated at West Downs preparatory school and Winchester, he was not particularly interested in studies, preferring games, or rather sport; although athletic, he hated all team games. One strong – perhaps the strongest – thread of his personality was the need to dominate, to be the one in control, and he enjoyed only those sports which allowed individual combat or expertise. Fencing, at which he became junior champion while still at Winchester, and boxing fulfilled these criteria perfectly; in the holidays, there was riding, and hunting with the Meynell with his mother and brothers.
At sixteen Mosley left Winchester to cram privately for Sandhurst. For the first time, he put his formidable intelligence to work, so successfully that he passed in top of the cavalry list. He was commissioned into the 16th Lancers, then stationed at the Curragh. Mosley, who longed to see action in the war that had just begun (on 3 September 1914), was attracted by the idea of the fledgling Royal Flying Corps, and managed to get permission to transfer, with the aim of training to become a pilot. By Christmas 1914 he was flying as an observer over the German lines. Then, in 1915, he crashed while landing, breaking his leg. It was this crash, he always maintained, that gave him his lifelong limp, though another story has it that he was so unpopular at Sandhurst that he was once chased by a group of fellow cadets, all baying for his blood, and to escape them jumped out of a first-floor window, landing awkwardly and breaking his leg.
He spent a year in England on sick leave – an additional (Army) version of the story being that he had injured his right ankle in an escapade at home – then went to the Curragh in June 1917, only to be eventually invalided out because he could not march. He began work at the Ministry of Munitions, followed by the Foreign Office.
His spell in hospital had given him a chance to think of the future. Politics seemed the obvious choice for someone determined to influence events, and as a wounded ex-officer he was a popular figure. A month after the Armistice, aged just twenty-two, he offered himself as a candidate in the December 1918 election. To a young man in a hurry, getting into parliament was more important than party: Mosley stood as a Conservative because it was the accepted thing for people of his class and background rather than from any deep-rooted conviction, and because he had been offered the safe Conservative seat of Harrow. Once elected, he abandoned the idea of life as a country gentleman and devoted himself wholeheartedly to politics.
He soon began to make a mark. Within months he had become Joint Secretary of the New Members Group, a cross-party association dedicated to promoting a centrist party. When he married Lady Cynthia Curzon (always known as Cimmie), the second of Lord Curzon’s three daughters by his immensely rich first wife, the seal seemed set on a glowing future. Cimmie’s father’s position as Foreign Secretary and former Viceroy of India, Mosley’s reputation as a gallant young officer and their combined good looks made their wedding, attended by King George V, Queen Mary and the King and Queen of the Belgians, one of the social events of 1920.
Soon, though, Mosley began to find himself out of sympathy with his party. His marriage to Curzon’s daughter did not stop him attacking the coalition government for its use of the Black and Tans in Ireland (an attitude later to stand him in good stead). ‘They confused the right of men to defend themselves with the right to wander round the countryside destroying the houses and property of innocent persons.’ He found the lack of discipline in this irregular force particularly repugnant.
In the election of 1922 he renounced the Conservative whip and stood as an Independent Conservative. Now a political outlaw, he was ignored by the party and its new leader, Baldwin, and was rapidly losing favour with his constituents. He realised that if he wished to remain in parliament, the path to the power he craved, he had to do something drastic. In 1924, after a brief flirtation with the Asquithian Liberals, he crossed the floor of the House to sit with the Labour Party.
He was welcomed delightedly, the Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, calling him ‘one of the greatest and most hopeful figures in politics’. For the party to have acquired this brilliant young man, already known as an orator, from the other side of what was then an almost impassable class barrier, was indeed a coup, though many of the rank and file were mistrustful. This youthful heir to a baronetcy and his rich, titled, beautiful wife, daughter of the arch-Conservative Curzon, who constantly figured in the glossy pages of society magazines – were they really serious in their commitment to the cloth-cap values of a movement founded to right the wrongs of an oppressed working class?
Then there was the question of Mosley’s women. Though only a small, but increasing, number of his own circle knew that he had been unfaithful to Cimmie from the first weeks of their marriage, the aroma of sexual success hung heavily about him. The Labour stalwarts sniffed it and were alarmed. To a party in which the moral climate had been formed by the crusading zeal of Keir Hardie, the earnest uprightness and abnegation of self-indulgence of the Webbs and the saintliness of George Lansbury, a puritanical approach to matters of the flesh was to be preferred to Mosley’s carefree hedonism.
Among many Conservatives, Mosley’s morals were considered more or less his own business, especially as he confined his amours to his own circle. ‘I may vote Labour but I sleep Tory,’ he would remark. More serious for the Tories was what they regarded as his treachery to everything he and his class stood for. Indignation rose so high that at one point there was a move to inflict the final sanction: expulsion from White’s Club. Curzon, of course, was furious at his son-in-law’s defection, especially when Cimmie, loyally changing her political allegiance to that of her husband, discovered a real talent for public speaking, and decided to stand as a Labour candidate herself.
Knowing that the voters of Harrow would not tolerate a further turn of their member’s coat, Mosley had to find another seat to fight in the 1924 general election. Characteristically, he decided to battle for one which, if won, would cause the greatest sensation – and bring him the most personal glory: Neville Chamberlain’s constituency of Ladywood, in Birmingham, held by the Chamberlains, the great Birmingham political dynasty, for fifty years. In an election which saw the first, short-lived Labour government swept from office Mosley came within a whisker of victory. The first count gave Chamberlain a majority of 20, a recount reduced this to 7, a third count went to Mosley, and a fourth finally put Chamberlain on top with a majority of 77, a victory so narrow that for the next election Chamberlain abandoned Ladywood for Edgbaston.
Two years later, Mosley was back in the House of Commons, winning a brilliant by-election victory in 1926 at Smethwick, where he raised the Labour majority from 1,253 to 6,582.By 1927 he had reached the five-strong National Executive of the Labour Party – an extraordinary feat for a man from the other side of the class barrier who had been a party member for only three years.
Cimmie, despite being pregnant, was hardly less active in the 1929 general election. She was standing for Stoke-on-Trent, but she campaigned vigorously wherever she was needed, often taking the chair for Ramsay MacDonald and making one of her effective speeches in his place. She was victorious in the election, achieving a majority of 7,850 over her Conservative opponent, Colonel Ward. Mosley, admiring and delighted, gave his wife a diamond brooch in the shape of the Palace of Westminster with the figures of her majority across it in rubies (one of the few occasions on which he bought jewellery for a wife). But the weeks of unremitting effort had taken so much out of Cimmie that she was exhausted. Two days after the poll, she miscarried. She recovered in time to take her seat on 27 June and made her maiden speech – on Widows’ Pensions – in October.
Mosley soon established a national reputation. He was energetic, ambitious, quick, witty, an excellent speaker who was just as effective on the floor of the House as when answering hecklers on the hustings, and he campaigned tirelessly for the party. He led as highly social a life as was consistent with the demands of party politics; against the drabness of much of the Labour movement Mr Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley stood out as a glamorous and exciting young couple. When Mosley succeeded his father in 1928 (‘a baronetcy’, he declared airily, ‘is not worth renouncing’) his title, like Cimmie’s fur coats, only added to the Mosleys’ aura of prestige and allure; already rich through Cimmie, he now inherited family estates worth £250,000.
The same year, he was re-elected to the National Executive. Largely through Cimmie, the Mosleys were now close to the Party’s leader, Ramsay MacDonald, whose penchant for pretty, charming, aristocratic women who made much of him was already drawing scorn from the serious-minded Webbs. Mosley himself was politically closer to Ernest Bevin.
On the party’s return to government in 1929 it was inevitable that Mosley, its rising star, would be given office and he was made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. With George Lansbury, the first Commissioner of Works, and under the aegis of J.H. Thomas, the Lord Privy Seal and former railway leader, he was entrusted with the preparation of schemes for ‘national reconstruction’ and, in particular, for the reduction of the demoralising unemployment gripping much of the country.
The plan he produced in January 1930 became known as the Mosley Memorandum. In the previous year’s general election, the Liberal Party had largely campaigned on the promise ‘We can conquer unemployment’, a manifesto based on the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes believed that, if there was sufficient determination, unemployment could be cured by a planned economy that combined the low interest rates necessary to stimulate demand with a programme of massive investment in public works and building. When the Liberal Party was virtually extinguished in the 1929 election – it won only 59 seats – Keynes and many of his supporters left it. The Mosley Memorandum was broadly Keynesian in its appeal.
It was a fifteen-page document summing up many of the ideas Mosley had been promulgating for the past four years. The first, and most controversial, section dealt with the executive powers that he believed necessary to put the second and third parts into operation; these, authoritative and similar to a wartime ‘inner Cabinet’, seemed to suggest dictatorial possibilities to his critics. The second and third sections dealt with long-term and short-term unemployment. To counter the first, industry had to become competitive, which meant rationalisation, up-to-date machinery, redeployment of manpower – and a probable increase in short-term unemployment for several years while this process was taking place. Short-term unemployment (even more urgent) would be dealt with by a programme of (badly-needed) road-building. To make both or either of these work, everything depended on effective administrative machinery.
Mosley’s proposals were supported by Lansbury, the Grand Old Man of the Labour Party. But between Mosley and Thomas there was both personal and intellectual antipathy, aggravated when Mosley sent his Memorandum direct to the Prime Minister rather than through Thomas – who learned of it through the Premier himself. Thomas opposed it; his view prevailed with the Cabinet, who rejected it; and on 20 May Mosley resigned the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster. Clement Attlee was appointed in his place.
Mosley knew, however, that many in the Labour Party were strongly sympathetic to his Memorandum, so at a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party at the end of May he insisted that it be put to the vote despite its earlier rejection by the Cabinet.
Strategically, this was a grave mistake. A defeat for the Cabinet so soon after taking office would signal serious internal dissension and effectively transmit the message that the government, already shuddering in the economic blizzard, had neither cohesion nor a coherent policy. The government Whips told members that if Ramsay MacDonald had thirty votes cast against him on the Mosley motion he would resign. They did not need to spell out the unspoken corollary: the resignation of the Prime Minister would throw the fledgling Labour government into total disarray within weeks of achieving office for only the second time. The party swung behind MacDonald and Mosley was defeated by 202 votes to 29.
He was still convinced of the validity of his ideas and he was determined, tenacious and ambitious. If his Memorandum went through he would be catapulted at once into one of the most significant political positions in the country. He determined on a further trial of strength. At the Party Conference at Llandudno in October he put the Memorandum forward yet again. The result, though a defeat – he won 1,046,000 votes against 1,251,000 – was so close that he was encouraged to believe that he could take followers with him. Impatient for power, he made the fatal mistake of resigning from the Labour Party.
Had he waited, continuing to work within the party, he might have become the next Labour leader. By June 1930 unemployment had already reached two million and many of the younger, more left-wing politicians had begun to think that the economic situation was so serious it might lead to a breakdown of the party system and the emergence of a radical new government. A year later MacDonald’s ‘betrayal’, when he accepted the King’s commission to form a national government, caused such unrelenting bitterness towards him and the few senior members who followed him that they were forced to stand as independent Labour candidates, leaving the vast mass of the party leaderless. As Harold Macmillan later wrote, ‘Here in Mosley the whole party would have found its leader: the man of ideas, the man of courage who alone had faced the realities and tried to bring precise and constructive solutions to the pressing problem of unemployment.’ But Mosley was not a man who liked waiting.