THE IDEA OF a new party had been mooted during discussions between Mosley and a group of like-minded fellow MPs. One of the most enthusiastic was John Strachey, a disciple of Mosley’s since 1923 when, shortly after leaving Oxford, he had fought Aston as Labour candidate in the general election; he was also a great friend of Cimmie’s. Others were W.E.D. (Bill) Allen, MP for a Belfast constituency and head of a large advertising firm, and W.J. Brown, Labour MP for East Wolverhampton and Secretary of the Civil Servants Association. It was to Brown, a man who threw off ideas like a catherine wheel, that the MP John Beckett, later to join the New Party, attributed its genesis. ‘Brown had the idea of a great New Party, backed by Mosley, Allen and their wealthy friends,’ wrote Beckett. ‘Mosley would be the necessary picturesque public figure, and Brown would act as mentor.’ Whoever had the original idea, it was Mosley who took the initiative, grasping the concept with the same speed and certainty with which he had embraced Keynesian economics for his Memorandum; from the start, it was his party.
By November 1930 Mosley had come to a firm decision that such a party should be launched but was not certain when to make his move. ‘If I strike now I may be premature. If I wait I may be too late. If I could have £250,000 and a press I should sweep the country.’
None of this uncertainty was visible in his demeanour. That November, at a Cliveden house party at which the thirty-two guests included Duff and Lady Diana Cooper, Harold and Dorothy Macmillan, Oliver and Lady Maureen Stanley, Brendan Bracken, Robert Boothby, Malcolm Bullock, Frank Pakenham, J.L. Garvin (the editor of the Observer), Harold Nicolson and a crowd of clever young men and pretty girls, Mosley was the undoubted star. He was fit, handsome and arrogant; at only thirty-three, he had resigned from government with great éclat on a point of principal while announcing that he alone knew the way forward. He was able to command the most beautiful women as his mistresses. The female members of the house party whispered excitedly to each other that some esoteric drug must account fot his sexual prowess; most of the men were fasinated by his powers of persuasion, his effect on women and his buccaneering courage. He told Harold Nicolson that he wanted to launch a new National Party and hoped to get the industrialist William Morris (the future Lord Nuffield) to finance him. At dinner he held forth to the younger generation. ‘After Peel comes Disraeli,’ he intoned to Frank Pakenham, recently down from Oxford. ‘After Baldwin and MacDonald comes . . .?’ He looked expectantly at Frank, who asked innocently, ‘Who?’ There was a long and awkward pause, until Mosley answered harshly, ‘Well . . . someone very different.’
By the beginning of February 1931, the plans for a new party were well advanced. On 4 February Cimmie, lunching with Harold Nicolson at Boulestin, secured his promise to join; neither of them saw anything incongruous in discussing the miseries of the ‘working man’ in such an elegant and expensive setting. The allegiance of Nicolson, then working for Lord Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard, was especially satisfactory, as through him Mosley hoped to gain the support of Beaverbrook – since the press was then the only real medium of publicity, a newspaper platform was invaluable.
Events moved swiftly. On the 15th a party of potentially sympathetic MPs came to Savehay Farm, the Mosleys’ home near Denham in Buckinghamshire. They included David Margesson, who became Conservative Chief Whip nine months later. Policies were discussed between energetic games of rounders, and the suggestion was made at dinner that night at the Stanleys that they should send Baldwin a parrot in the hope of giving him psittacosis.
A fortnight later, on 28 February, the New Party was launched. It had a brisk programme of reform – including, of course, the ‘abolition’ of unemployment by spending public money on road building, slum clearance and the building of new houses, which would simultaneously put money in the workers’ pockets and improve their living conditions.
At first the omens were good. Macmillan and Margesson hinted that they might become Mosley supporters, John Strachey followed his friend over from the Labour Party, as did Stanley Baldwin’s son Oliver, Allan Young, Robert Forgan and a dozen or so others. There was one disappointing dissenter: W.J. Brown, the fertility of whose ideas was equalled only by his ability to take up the opposite position the following day (he later became editor of the Daily Express). He now declared himself unable to join the New Party because his union disapproved and he could not afford to forfeit their support. When Mosley offered to guarantee him against financial loss and obtained his union’s permission for him to join, Brown’s only recourse was to retire to bed ill and remain there incommunicado.
Harold Nicolson was convinced that Mosley would some day become Prime Minister but Lady Oxford (Margot Asquith), who believed in Mosley and had been exceptionally kind to him, was so furious at his defection that she pinched him sharply with a long clawlike hand. Cimmie, unlike most of Mosley’s early adherents, required considerable persuasion. A committed socialist, she was distressed and agitated at the idea of leaving the Labour Party, but gradually came round to her husband’s view that only the New Party could save Britain.
It was fortunate she did. Almost at once Mosley went down with a virulent bout of influenza (dangerous and debilitating in those days before antibiotics). As he sat white and exhausted in their Great George Street flat, hoarsely dictating the New Party Manifesto to a secretary and a rota of typists, Cimmie, supportive as ever, stepped into the breach and took meeting after meeting.
Mosley recovered in time to speak on behalf of Allan Young on 27 April at the Ashton-under-Lyne by-election. His 7,000 hearers included friends and supporters such as the Stanleys, the playwright Freddie Lonsdale and Professor Joad (later to become famous in the BBC’s ‘Brains Trust’). But despite the enthusiasm of the audience, swayed as always by Mosley’s oratory, Young’s Conservative opponent was elected in May with 12,420 votes. Labour polled 11,005 and Young got a mere 1,172.
It was a bad beginning. But the New Party, with its calls for ‘action’, was nevertheless attracting members – especially the young Maynard Keynes, sympathetic to a movement dedicated to his economic principles, offered encouragement, and it was learned that the Prince of Wales looked on the New Party with favour. Mosley and Nicolson – who was now deeply involved – decided that what was needed was a weekly paper to disseminate the New Party credo and serve as rallying point for the faithful. Nicolson, who was to edit it, bravely left his job at the Evening Standard. (‘Go to hell with ye,’ said Lord Beaverbrook, who felt Nicolson was making a profound mistake, ‘and God bless ye.’) Offices were found, at 5 Gordon Square, furnished by Nicolson (‘Carpets from Maples and blue curtains throughout’), a dummy prepared and a printer commissioned. Mosley expressed himself as willing to lose £15,000 over two years. The paper was called, predictably, Action; and the message ‘It’s time for action!’ was hammered home constantly, amid book reviews, articles on modern architecture and advice on rose-growing from Vita Sackville-West.
As the weeks passed the New Party began to veer further to the right. This unexpected change of political orientation was profoundly disturbing to its original adherents. On 23 July John Strachey and Allan Young both resigned, giving as their reasons their deep suspicion of tendencies they had begun to perceive as fascist. The publicity this attracted and the photographs of their unhappy faces, wretched at the prospect of breaking with the man they admired and liked, damaged the New Party.
Eight days later, their fears were confirmed. Mosley publicly demonstrated his switch to the right by crossing the floor of the House again. He now sat behind the Conservatives.
The real test of the New Party’s hold on the public imagination was soon to come. In August, while Mosley was holidaying in Cap d’Antibes, Ramsay MacDonald resigned. As leader of a Labour government, he was unable to countenance the cut in the dole demanded by foreign bankers before they would lend the money essential to resolve Britain’s financial crisis. He set off for Buckingham Palace with the resignations of the entire Cabinet in his pocket. But within hours, to cries of ‘Traitor!’ from his party, he was reinstated as Prime Minister of a National Government, promising to call an election as soon as the immediate situation was restored.
New political alignments sprang up overnight. The Labour Party, headless, splintered its forces: at Peckham alone, the election was to see three Labour hopefuls – one a MacDonald Labour candidate, another the rebel left-wing MP John Beckett for the Independent Labour Party and a third representing the main Labour Party. Randolph Churchill, charged by his father to find out if Mosley would join Churchill and the ‘Tory toughs’ in opposition, rushed over from Biarritz, but Mosley had no hesitation in refusing. The crowd of photographers waiting to greet Mosley on his return to London with Harold Nicolson (Nicolson had gone to Dover to meet him) demonstrated his importance on the political scene.
Despite the fact that no date had yet been set for the general election, the parties all began campaigning at once. Mosley’s, from the first, attracted the kind of opposition that spilled over all too readily into violence. On a wet September day he appeared in Trafalgar Square in front of a crowd of 300, escorted by the burliest members of his newly formed ‘Youth Movement’ and guarded by the East End boxer ‘Kid’ Lewis – there had been rumours that the communists intended to break up the meeting. Just over a week later, on 20 September, razors, stones and fists were used against him by a small group of communists at a meeting of 20,000 in Glasgow.
Mosley’s reaction was to say that this was a sign that the New Party needed a trained, disciplined and uniformed force of stewards to keep the peace at future meetings, rather than supporters identifiable only by the marigolds in their buttonholes. On 12 October a headquarters for the Youth Movement was established at 122 King’s Road, Chelsea, where classes for fencing, boxing, jujitsu and gymnastics were organised.
Deciding on a uniform was more difficult. Harold Nicolson’s suggestion of grey flannel shirts and trousers – grey flannel trousers, then worn by nearly everyone, had the great merit of cheapness – was considered too unadventurous and the question of uniform was put on one side to be considered later.
The general election took place on 27 October. New Party candidates stood in twenty-four constituencies. Theoretically, they had a sporting chance: the New Party appealed to the fair number who viewed MacDonald as dangerously left wing but who also believed that only a radical solution would end the misery of the poor.
Mosley himself stood for Cimmie’s seat of Stoke-on-Trent (she was pregnant again), campaigning in favour of a tariff barrier against imports. By now his view of leadership was not the traditional primus inter pares of British Prime Ministers since Walpole but that of an autocrat – even of an aspiring dictator. In the issue of Action which appeared a week before the election he had advocated draconian reform of the legislature and executive. ‘Legislation must be passed, or rejected, within a short time-limit,’ he proclaimed on Action’s front page. ‘An inner Cabinet, analogous to the War Cabinet, should be constituted and consist of five Ministers only without portfolio. These proposals are so simple as to seem obvious.’
Within the New Party there were similar disturbing signs. Mosley believed, ‘For a new party to achieve power, its ideology must be based on emotion’, and emotion of a raw and alien kind was what he increasingly played on in his speeches. With his physical magnetism and oratorical skill he could always invoke wild enthusiasm. He would stand on platform or da?¨s, chin raised as he inhaled the applause, while behind him stood the Praetorian Guard of the Youth Movement. ‘Members of Party Branches may be of either sex,’ said the rules, ‘but the Control Group must consist of young, fit and proven male members of the party.’
Mosley’s personal style, too, had become that of the full-blown demagogue. James Lees-Milne, who spent a fortnight canvassing for him, became increasingly uneasy:
it became clear that Mosley was a man of overweening egotism. He did not know the meaning of humility. He brooked no argument, would accept no advice. He was overbearing, and over-confident. He had in him the stuff of which zealots are made. His eyes flashed fire, dilated and contracted like a mesmerist’s. His voice rose and fell in hypnotic cadences. He was madly in love with his own words. It could be a terrible day, I fancied, when they ran away with him and took the wrong turning. 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.
The election may have been a disaster for Labour, which mustered only 52 seats against the Conservatives’ 473 (other National candidates brought the government’s total strength up to 521), but it was a catastrophe for the New Party. Few of its 24 candidates had any political experience whatsoever – ‘Kid’ Lewis was one, another was Lees-Milne’s Oxford friend Christopher Hobhouse, known as the ‘Babies’ Candidate’ because he was only twenty-five – and all were defeated. Twenty-two, including Harold Nicolson, lost their deposits.fn1 At Stoke, Mosley, with 10,500 votes, came bottom of the poll.
The party’s paper, Action, was now the only hope. There was still £14,000 left to run it, but it was haemorrhaging money. Despite distinguished contributors such as Christopher Isherwood, Peter Quennell, Osbert Sitwell, L.A.G. Strong and Nicolson himself, its circulation had fallen from 160,000 to 16,000 within ten weeks of its launch.
By November Nicolson had realised that Mosley’s ideas were diverging irrevocably from his own. ‘He believes in fascism. I don’t. I loathe it.’ Nevertheless, he agreed to accompany Mosley on a visit to the two fascist leaders, Hitler and Mussolini, in early January. In the last issue of Action, published on 31 December 1931, they explained that they were going in order to study ‘new political forces born of crisis, conducted by youth and inspired by completely new ideas of economic and political organisation’. Though they went on to say that they did not intend to import Italian or German practices into Britain, this did not allay unease at home. In the event, illness prevented Mosley from travelling to Berlin, so he only visited Mussolini.
Il Duce and his fascist government had been in power for ten years. In 1932, fascism did not have the iniquitous and bloody reputation it later acquired – especially as the Italian brand of fascism did not at this stage include anti-semitism. The average Briton, inasmuch as he thought about Mussolini at all, regarded him as a vaguely good thing albeit a trifle comic with his strutting pomposity and general flamboyance (the large carbuncle on his skull was carefully erased from official photographs). Il Duce had done much to quell the Mafia in Sicily, had drained the Pontine Marshes and – of prime importance to the English traveller – made the trains run on time.
Mosley and Nicolson arrived in Rome on the evening of 1 January 1932, having spent New Year’s Eve in Paris – Mosley celebrating it with friends and staying up until eight a.m. They were met by Christopher Hobhouse, who drove them to the Excelsior. Here, in the vast drawing room of a luxurious suite with opulent Edwardian décor – Mosley invariably did himself well – Hobhouse reported that Hitler had been dismissive of their political stance. ‘He says that “We British Hitlerites are trying to do things like gentlemen. That will never do. We must be harsh, violent and provocative.”’
Harshness, provocativeness and violence were to become part of British fascism, but at that time Mosley seemed more impressed by the milder Italian model.
Mosley was full of these ideas when he met Diana at Barbara Hutchinson’s party at the end of February. She had spent most of the evening talking to the man on her other side, Victor Rothschild (later to marry Barbara) and was unaware that Mosley had already marked her down. The summer before, he had seen her at a ball given by the Duchess of Rutland at Sir Philip Sassoon’s house in Park Lane, framed by the rose-entwined pillars flanking the ballroom as she danced dreamily past and, like Bryan before him, he never forgot that first glimpse. Later, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘Her starry blue eyes, golden hair and ineffable expression of a Gothic madonna seemed remote from the occasion but strangely enough not entirely inappropriate.’
But at that first meeting no spark was struck between them. What conversation they had was largely confined to politics and when, at the end of dinner, Mosley made a short and jokey speech in honour of Barbara, most of it was taken up with ragging her father, ‘Hutchie’, of whom he was an old friend. Diana, who knew that Mosley was supposed to be a brilliant speaker, was a trifle disappointed. After dinner she was one of a sceptical group listening to Cimmie vehemently defend her husband’s views on fascism.
Nor did Diana find him particularly attractive. Bryan, always conscious of what she was doing and whether or not she appeared to find a man appealing, was so untroubled by her reaction that he did not even mention Mosley afterwards. For his part, Mosley thought Diana was argumentative – she described herself then as a ‘Lloyd George Liberal’.
Diana left the Hutchinsons’ party with no idea that she would ever see Mosley again, and no particular wish to do so.
But now that he was no longer in parliament, he and Cimmie once more took up their life in the small, tight nucleus of London society of which Diana was now a part. From then on, his path and Diana’s crossed almost daily. Invariably, their conversation turned to politics and, as Diana listened to Mosley expounding his ideas with all the fire, brilliance and persuasiveness of which he was capable, she became increasingly convinced that here was the only man who could save the country. He himself had no doubt of the rightness of his approach.
The leaders of both major parties felt that now he had learned where impetuousness led, this young, ardent and brilliantly gifted man might be wooed back into their respective folds. Early in March, he was approached by David Margesson, now Tory Chief Whip, who, realising that straightforward Conservatism would hold no appeal for Mosley, tactfully suggested that he stood as a National Independent. At about the same time, Joseph Kenworthy offered him the leadership of the now-minute Labour Party – something Mosley would have jumped at only a year earlier. He turned it down flat, as he had the less enticing Conservative proposal. ‘He is still obsessed by Mussolini ideas,’ noted Harold Nicolson gloomily in his diary.
On 5 April 1932 the Executive Committee of the New Party decided to dissolve the Party but to keep on the Youth Movement. By now Mosley was a fascist in all but name, and close to the dangerous principle that violence ‘in certain circumstances’ might be necessary. It was a crossroads, and Nicolson severed his connection with him. His friends remarked on symptoms of the developing political creed that filled his mind. ‘Lunched downstairs with Tom,’ noted Georgia Sitwell that spring, ‘he was a trifle absurd as usual about Superman, Nietzsche, Schiller, Napoleon etc.’
For Mosley, fascism blended the Utopian ideal with the Nietzschean concept of the Superman – the individual striving to raise himself above the common clay of humanity while working for the good of the community. He believed that the goal of a better society could be achieved by that supreme instrument of power, the will, expressed through action, backed up where necessary by a cadre of tough, muscular, disciplined and dedicated young men. As for who set the course of that action, there could be only one possible answer: the Leader. It was the name by which he would shortly become known to Diana.
fn1 Then £150, forfeited if the candidate achieved less than 12.5% of the poll.