Although I came to love Diana Mosley personally, I abhorred her politics. The hundreds of hours I spent with her, the personal papers and correspondence she let me read, her diaries and the many letters we exchanged over the years helped illumine the complex personality and extraordinary life of the woman who became a focus of controversy and hatred, as her chosen course ran counter first to the social conventions of her time and then, devastatingly, to the beliefs of her country as it fought for its life. As I believe objectivity is one of the first duties of a biographer, I have tried to tell her story as it happened, without benefit of hindsight, so that readers can come to their own conclusions.
What first struck everyone who met her was her beauty. Throughout her long life it cast an enduring spell. Even her mosaic image on the floor of the National Gallery, with its blind blue gaze, refulgent blondeness and curved Grecian limbs, expresses this goddess-like quality. Yet the romantic adoration she evoked was, strangely, almost free of sexual content – like her sister Nancy, she was often surrounded by a homosexual coterie.
The cleverest of the six Mitford sisters, Diana was brought up in a household where extremism and prejudice were the norm, overlaid by exquisite, old-fashioned manners. Later, her love of music and the arts, her good looks and legendary charm often blinded both admirers and critics to the obnoxiousness of her views, while her high intelligence and the heritage of her privileged yet eccentric background endowed her with remarkable self-confidence and a disdain for the opinion of others.
As a young woman her elegance, warmth, gaiety and oblique wit ensured that she became an iconic figure, with intimates ranging from social figures such as Lady Cunard and Daisy Fellowes to writers and artists such as Evelyn Waugh, Lytton Strachey, Cecil Beaton, John Betjeman, Harold Acton and Augustus John.
After her meeting with Mosley and her complete enthralment by both the man and his ideas, her political beliefs and attitudes changed and hardened, geared only to what ‘The Leader’, as she called Mosley, thought and did. It was during his absences, speaking round the country to raise support for his newly formed fascist party, that she first went to Germany, followed by her meeting with Hitler – the man who carried The Leader’s political beliefs to their ultimate.
Within a few years, she had become one of the Führer’s intimates, closer to him than any other woman except Magda Goebbels and Winifred Wagner; and of necessity on familiar terms with most of his most sinister henchmen. Then, and later, she made no secret of her great affection for and admiration of the man she and her sister Unity called ‘sweet Uncle Wolf’.
‘If the proper study of mankind is man, then having had the luck to know such an unusual man the only thing to do was to see as much of him as possible,’ she declared.
Although quite clear that fascism would never have worked after the war – after all, by that time Mosley had already said so – she remained equally convinced it would have been a valid form of government in the 1930s. Her view was that major reforms could be enacted only with a small number – five, three or preferably one, and that one her husband – at the top, with the power to carry through decisions.
Internment in prison (during the war, and under Regulation 18B) did nothing to modify these convictions. When, eventually, after several years of refusing to believe it, she was forced to admit the Holocaust had actually happened (though in true Diana vein she claimed it had been exaggerated) she was horrified. ‘I thought it appalling, wicked, monstrous,’ she said.
Hitler, however, escaped her condemnation. To the end, she maintained her affection for this man, who so nearly demolished everything the western world stands for. ‘Knowing about the Holocaust absolutely did not change my perspective of Hitler,’ she told me. ‘I don’t think of him as the man who did that, I think of him as the man I knew, who wouldn’t have been capable of that. If he became so capable, it was really a form of madness, which in a way is understandable if everything you’ve worked for is being ruined.’
When asked what would have happened to the Jews if there had, as her husband Sir Oswald Mosley had advocated, been a negotiated peace, she would respond with the same wilfully blind disingenuousness that Hitler ‘might have given them Morocco or Tunis or some other emptyish place’ (presumably forcibly acquired from its inhabitants in this same ‘negotiated peace’). ‘And then they would have been told “either go, or stay at your own risk”,’ a draconian solution that appeared to cause her no qualms at all.
Friends learnt either to avoid the whole question of politics or to appear to submit to the selective truths with which she justified her view of history. To interviewers, she would respond with practised ease. Ask about the Holocaust, and she would reply: ‘What about the Gulag? Stalin killed many more than Hitler. Or the thirty million Chinese killed in the so-called Cultural Revolution? What about Pol Pot? The fact is, we live in a cruel world.’
How could a woman so intelligent, perceptive and intuitive not only embrace the tenets of National Socialism so wholeheartedly but remain faithful to the memory of a man who led the world into a terrible war and attempted the genocide of an entire race?
The answer – which caused a lifelong conflict at the core of her being – lay in her own powerful, passionate and singlehearted nature.
There is no doubt that Mosley would have been a fascist whether or not he had met Diana – indeed, he had already begun to contemplate it before their meeting – but it is highly unlikely Diana would have embraced such an unEnglish creed if she had never met Mosley.
Instead, her politics might have settled somewhere left of centre. She had been deeply affected by the miseries of the General Strike in 1926, and her political sympathies lay with the underdog; on the other hand, she thought socialism dreary in the extreme. ‘I suppose I would have described myself as a Lloyd George liberal,’ she told me.
Then came Mosley, a man for whom politics and sexual domination were inextricably intertwined (later, he far preferred Mussolini to Hitler because he regarded the Italian leader as more virile), met at the moment when his genuine idealism for banishing the terrible unemployment of the early 1930s was at its height. His conviction, personal magnetism and well-honed sexual expertise quickly bound her to him. From then on she followed him unswervingly, clinging to many of his beliefs even after he himself had abandoned them.
Or as she said herself when I asked her how, at the age of twenty-two, in love with a married man who had told her he had no intention of leaving his wife, she had seen the future, she replied simply: ‘My idea of the future was him.’ And for her, that is how it remained.
Anne de Courcy,
London,