Springtime for Mosley

By R.Z. Sheppard

OSWALD MOSLEY

by ROBERT SKIDELSKY

578 pages. Holt, Rinehart &

Winston. $15.

The world knows Sir Oswald Mosley best at his worst--as the leader of the Union of British Fascists, who, flanked by black-shirted Biff Boys in the 1930s, praised Mussolini and Hitler and parroted their antiSemitism. But in fact, Mosley, now 78, has mesmerized, enraged and even amused generations of Englishmen, first as a Conservative M.P., then as an Independent Liberal, a Socialist Laborite, a Fascist isolationist and, finally, as a postwar internationalist preaching European unity. As the sixth in a line of Yorkshire baronets, Mosley frequently wore his own black shirt under a Savile Row suit.

Bad Penny. The Mosley brand of National Socialism never became more than a barnacle on a political system renowned for its tolerance and stability. He was condemned by his peers as a betrayer of his class, not to mention a "Fascist hyena." Mosley had blown any chance for power before he was 40. But as the perennial bad penny of British political life, he keeps turning up at embarrassing moments. Robert Skidelsky's generous biography appears at a time when people everywhere are longing again for order and authority. England is swirling dangerously close to the drain of economic ruin and the possibility of a government dominated by left-wing labor unions.

If Mosley is saying "I told you so," he has some justification. Though it is easy to despise his tactics, Skidelsky argues that Mosley has usually had a realistic grip on trends in economics and history. Earlier than most, he understood the breakdown of 19th century imperialistic capitalism and the ways in which investments flowed toward cheap labor and eliminated jobs at home. As a Member of Parliament in the '20s, he attempted to introduce Keynesian theories into monetary planning. His social proposals in the '30s were not unlike Franklin Roosevelt's. Historian A.J.P. Taylor has gone so far as to declare Mosley the best political thinker of the age, although synthesizer seems the more appropriate judgment. Rather than a burning sense of injustice, Biographer Skidelsky detects a "burning sense of inefficiency" as motivating Mosley's enormous energies.

Mosley worked hard at projecting the heroic image of himself. As the son of a wealthy Midlands family, he never lacked sumptuous props or staging. The fact that he was also a good-looking 6 ft. 2 in. did not hurt either. During World War I, he was a flyer and an infantry officer. He was a skillful amateur boxer, and later became a member of Britain's fencing team. Even as a Socialist and disillusioned survivor of the first World War's unchivalrous slaughter, Mosley never lost his dash. His political enemies called him the Playboy of the West End World. His first wife, Cynthia Curzon, daughter of a marquess and granddaughter of a Chicago multimillionaire, made racy copy. Wrote one gossip columnist: Lady Cynthia attended a theater opening "well on the gold standard in a glittering sequined coat." Her sister Alexandra was nicknamed Ba-Ba-Blackshirt.

Lady Cynthia died in 1933. Three years later Mosley secretly married Diana Freeman-Mitford in Berlin. The wedding luncheon was given by Mrs. Joseph Goebbels, and the honored guests included Adolf Hitler, who saw Diana as "the ideal Nordic woman." At the time, Hitler was a close friend of Diana's sister, Unity Mitford, whose active infatuation with Nazism ended in a botched suicide attempt at the outbreak of World War II. Even though Mosley had pledged to fight against Germany if England was attacked, Churchill prudently had him and his wife interned for 3 1/2 years as possible fifth columnists.

Aristocratic Disdain. Biographer Skidelsky, who teaches at Johns Hopkins, works hard at creating a sympathetic and revealing study of the root of Mosley's fascism. A shameless elitism and a longing for an almost feudal sense of self-sufficient community, a revulsion against war caused by his experiences in 1914, and an aristocrat's disdain for the middle class are primary elements in Mosley's career. The author goes soupy, however, when it comes to explaining Mosley the man. A comparison to Goethe's Faust--who used evil to gain a higher good--is material for a bizarre satirical comedy by Mel Brooks rather than part of a serious political study. To say that Mosley's anti-Semitism was simply "intellectual and moral carelessness" is practically an insult to Mosley's intelligence. His own son, Novelist Nicholas Mosley, was closer to the mark when he said of his father, "While the right hand dealt with grandiose ideas and glory, the left hand let the rat out of the sewer."

--R.Z. Sheppard

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