It is lucky for England that her homegrown would-be Führer finally turned out to be little more than a weird historical footnote. Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and its “Defense Force” of thuggish Blackshirts, was a sinister character, to be sure, but he was also something of a buffoon. Mosley’s one-time associate Harold Nicolson saw the perils inherent in his chosen role early on, and warned him that  

fascism is not suitable to England. In Italy there was a long history of secret societies. In Germany there was a long tradition of militarism. Neither had a sense of humour. In England anything on these lines is doomed to failure and ridicule.

Whether it was really because of the national sense of humor (a self-flattering notion), or because of the country’s long and largely successful system of parliamentary government, or in fact because of fatal flaws in Mosley’s own character--underneath everything he was, as Beatrice Webb intuited early in his career, a cynic— England was to prove infertile soil for his movement, and Mosley, after a brief flirtation with power, spent the last forty years of his life a pariah.

It is possible—and to be hoped—that Mosley will be best known to future generations as the original for P. G. Wodehouse’s immortal character Sir Roderick Spode, leader of a fascist organization called the Black Shorts. In The Code of the Woosters, the usually timorous Bertie Wooster musters his courage and faces down the bullying leader:

Just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting “Heil Spode!” and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: “Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?”

Mosley was also lampooned, and even more ruthlessly, considering the source, by his sister-in-law Nancy Mitford in her farcical novel Wigs on the Green, a silly soufflé of a book that would seem the height of absurdity if one didn’t know the facts of the Mitfords’ lives, but was in fact not far short of kitchen-sink realism.

Mosley’s notoriety was heightened by his marriage to Diana, the most beautiful of the beautiful Mitford sisters. Diana Mosley, today nearly ninety and residing in France, wrote a memoir—A Life of Contrasts (1977) —but has never been the subject of a biography; now Jan Dalley, literary editor of the Financial Times and the wife of the poet Andrew Motion, has produced a readable life of this surpassingly strange woman. It couldn’t have been an easy task. Diana Mosley’s character is in essence a negative one: her life, her gestures, her opinions were quite conscious reflections of those of her man. She deliberately allowed herself to be obscured by her husband’s gaudier personality, as she had been obscured during childhood and adolescence by her powerful older siblings, Nancy and Tom. Diana Mosley has always been a cipher, and, Dalley’s efforts notwithstanding, she remains one.

Much, probably too much, has already been written about the highly colored Mitford family, and Dalley doesn’t waste much space rehearsing the familiar tale. To sum them up: Nancy, the eldest, became a well-known comic novelist whose two best books, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, created a potent romantic myth about the Mitford family; Unity turned Nazi as a teenager, moved to Germany, became one of Hitler’s most visible hangers-on, and shot herself (not fatally) upon the outbreak of war; Jessica became a Communist, eloped with her cousin to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and eventually moved to America, where she spent the rest of her life as a prominent left-wing journalist; Deborah, the youngest, became the Duchess of Devonshire. Only the more retiring Pam and Tom, who was killed in the Burma campaign of 1945, kept out of the limelight.

It was a family of passionate, often violently expressed convictions, and at first the self-contained Diana seemed out of place in it. Her political awakening came during the General Strike of 1926: she was shaken by the poverty and unemployment she saw as though for the first time, and turned away from her parents’ dearly-held conservatism to become a Lloyd George liberal.

Lord and Lady Redesdale, the Mitford parents, did not believe in sending girls to school, and Diana’s formal education was limited to instruction from a motley series of governesses and a few months at the Cours Fénelon in Paris at the age of sixteen. She read widely under the guidance of her older siblings, and became very well informed; later she expressed her belief that “it really depends, ultimately, on oneself whether one is educated or not.” The Mitfords’ life was hermetic by modern standards, but for a curious and impressionable girl there were potent outside influences to be soaked up: the gregarious Nancy, six years older than Diana, brought home many of her friends, aesthetic and homosexual “butterflies” who tended to enrage the conventionally masculine Lord Redesdale. It was the high noon of the Bright Young Things, and Nancy’s friends, who included John Betjeman, Robert Byron, and Evelyn Waugh, eventually became Diana’s. Diana found frequent refuge, too, with the Churchills at Chartwell; Clementine Churchill was a cousin of Lady Redesdale. (Dalley points out that Diana had the odd distinction of being one of the few people who knew both Hitler and Churchill well.)

Diana’s time in Paris, where she stayed with the painter Paul-César Helleu and his family, was her first real journey outside of the family orbit, and it came as a revelation of freedom and sophistication. Sadly, Helleu fell ill and died that year, and Diana returned to England. The hiatus was supposed to be only temporary, but disaster struck: Muv (Lady Redesdale) discovered and read Diana’s Paris diary, with its descriptions of her very mild amorous escapades. “Even by the standards of Mitford family storms,” writes Dalley, “the ensuing argument was a big one.” Neither of Diana’s parents would speak to her for days; she was forbidden to return to Paris and banished to the seaside with her three little sisters and their governess. Bored and furious, smarting under the ignominy, Diana vowed to get away from home once and for all, and as quickly as possible.

With this goal in mind she became engaged only months after her official debut, choosing a young man who was kind, rich, intelligent, spectacularly eligible, and deeply antipathetic to her own personality. Bryan Guinness was twenty-two years old when they met, a popular member of her social circle, and heir to the fabulous Guinness Brewery fortune. They had only known each other three months when he proposed, and it seems clear that they misread one another from the start: Bryan “loved in [her] the fresh country girl he took her to be” while Diana, desperate for independence, persuaded herself that she really cared for this pleasant, undemanding man who offered it to her.

They were married in January 1929 at a huge society wedding, honeymooned in Paris, and returned to a pretty house in Westminster. Less than two years earlier, Diana had been considered too young to come downstairs for a dinner party; now she had a rich husband and a large establishment, and she quickly became one of the leading younger hostesses, entertaining constantly both in London and at their country house. She had plenty of avid admirers—Waugh, depressed at the breakup of his first marriage, fell in love with her during her first pregnancy, a situation he described in his aborted novel Work Suspended—but she was not, nor would she ever be, interested in casual affairs. It was not until she met the mesmeric Mosley that she turned away from Bryan.

It was the spring of 1932: her new lover was thirty-five, she not yet twenty-two, with two baby sons. Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, sixth baronet, was a member of the old aristocracy. Expelled from Sandhurst in 1914 for the kind of violent altercation that would later make him notorious, he was hurriedly recalled two months later with the outbreak of World War I, in which he served until invalided out in 1916. Back in London for the last two years of the war, he launched himself into social and political life, eventually gaining a seat as Unionist MP for Harrow, supporting Lloyd George’s coalition and advocating a sort of “socialistic imperialism.” “The beginning of Mosley’s parliamentary career contained, in embryo, all its later characteristics,” Dalley writes. “From the start, he hardly seemed to care which party he chose … his own views were what mattered.”

Mosley fell out with Lloyd George over the latter’s Irish policies, specifically the use of the hated “Black and Tans,” and he was instrumental in bringing about the negotiations with Sinn Fein that led to the declaration of the Irish Free State. “For the next few years Mosley was the darling of the liberal press … and of progressive thinkers and the growing Labour movement.” In 1922 he won a seat in parliament as an independent, and two years later was recruited by Ramsay Macdonald for the new Labour Party.

In 1920 Mosley had married the middle daughter of Lord Curzon, Lady Cynthia —always called Cimmie. Aside from being an heiress, Cimmie was a tremendous political asset, for she possessed all the warmth and genuineness the hard, glittering Mosley so conspicuously lacked. Many Labour members taunted the couple for their ostentatious wealth and lifestyle, but that worked two ways: as Dalley points out, Mosley’s “rousing speeches, and the sight of Lady Cynthia swathed in her furs, drew working-class supporters in their thousands.” In 1927 Mosley was elected to a Labour seat, and two years later Cimmie joined him in parliament.

Although he truly loved Cimmie, Mosley’s prodigious energy was never satisfied unless he was carrying on one or more extramarital affairs, mostly with bored young married women of his own set. (His motto: “Vote Labour, Sleep Tory”). He was, as he would continue to be during the years with Diana, quite straightforward about his goings-on, even procuring a bachelor pad just a few hundred yards from the family home, complete with a large bed on a raised dais in a curtained alcove.

Mosley had entered the cabinet in 1929 as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with a special responsibility for unemployment. The Depression was underway, and like many others Mosley felt that the slow give-and-take of parliamentary democracy was not equal to the challenge. He issued a memorandum proposing a series of short-term emergency schemes. Many of them were sensible, the same sort of ideas that Keynes was advocating and that the Roosevelt administration in America would later adopt, but others smacked to Mosley’s opponents of dictatorship, and the memorandum was rejected.

Mosley resigned from the cabinet and gathered around him a group of disaffected MPs and thinkers including the all-powerful press lords Rothermere and Beaverbrook. In December he issued a proposed policy called the “Mosley Manifesto,” and three months later he launched his “New Party.” Some of the New Party members were pure socialists, while some, like Mosley himself, were moving toward fascism. The movement was soon rent apart from within and formally disbanded in 1932. Mosley’s parliamentary career was over; his life as a fascist now began in earnest.

It was at this point that he and Diana met. For her it was, as her son Jonathan Guinness later wrote, “the passion of Juliet and … the conversion of St. Paul; emotion and conviction were inseparable.” “In politics, as in everything else, Diana had a taste for the extreme,” Dalley comments, and Mosley— whom most people called Tom but whom Diana dubbed Kit—satisfied that taste, both on the personal and political levels. Mosley had no intention of losing Cimmie; if Diana wanted him, she had to accept him on his terms. She accepted them, and in an extraordinarily risky and, for the era, outrageous move she left Bryan and set up on her own, living openly as Mosley’s mistress, with small hope of marriage.

Mosley possessed an enviable gift for eating his cake and having it too. He squired Diana about with little care for the effects their romance was having on Cimmie; he continued to sleep with other women, too, including Cimmie’s younger sister Baba (who was married to a man with the wonderfully Wodehousian name of Fruity Metcalfe). Then in 1933, very unexpectedly, Cimmie Mosley died.

This was a stroke of luck for Diana, but at the time she was afraid to interpret it as such; Mosley was devastated, and Diana “realized straight away that Cimmie’s death, with all its ramifications of guilt and grief and family concerns, might spell trouble for her relationship.” Cimmie’s sisters, Baba Metcalfe and Lady Irene Ravensdale, rallied round Mosley and did their best to expel Diana from his life.

It was agreed that Baba and Mosley should spend the summer motoring through France together, while Irene took the children away on a cruise: Fruity Metcalfe, Baba’s husband, was given a talking-to by Irene and told he must quell his jealousy and allow Baba to comfort Mosley, “for Cimmie’s sake.”

Now Mosley began to toy with Baba and Diana as he had once toyed with Diana and Cimmie, and Diana knew that she would have to play her own hand with restraint. With Mosley and Baba off to France and her Guinness children on holiday with their father, she made what was to be a fateful plan: she and Unity, by now an awkward and unpopular debutante, would pay a visit to Germany at the invitation of Putzi Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s foreign press secretary, whom Diana had met at a London party.

The two soon-to-be-infamous sisters set off for Munich, arriving just in time for the 1933 Parteitag, the first Nuremberg rally of the Nazi era. Diana’s later contention that her trip had nothing to do with the BUF is dubious; so is her claim that “We heard the speeches Hitler made, most of them very short, and we understood not a single word.” That’s as may be, but since these speeches formally launched Hitler’s campaign for racial purity, it seems odd that she heard or comprehended no talk about Kultur, Rasse, and Volk on this German trip. She was deeply admiring of everything she witnessed there.

Unity was more than admiring: she was besotted, and from the spring of 1934 she spent most of her time in Germany, providing Diana and Tom Mitford, also a budding fascist, with a convenient home away from home. (David Pryce-Jones’s Unity Mitford [1976] provides a vivid chronicle of these prewar years.) Unity, who seems to have been emotionally if not mentally retarded, developed a whopping crush on the Führer and was an assiduous stalker, sitting in his favorite Munich restaurant for hours and gaping at Hitler until he eventually befriended this big, blonde, Aryan goddess. Unity introduced Diana to Hitler in 1935, and for next four years the sisters were regularly seen in his company, by his side at every Parteitag, at every Bayreuth Festival, and at the 1936 Olympic Games. Hitler was even a guest—one of the very few—at the Mosleys’ wedding.

Diana thought her ties with the German regime would be helpful to Mosley. In the end, they merely added extra tarnish to the violence, the racist oratory, and the contempt for democracy that fatally discredited the BUF. Mosley had many gifts, but good judgment in choosing his associates was not one of them, and from the beginning he entrusted vital duties within the BUF to the unstable extremists in his camp, for example handing over the movement’s official organ, The Blackshirt, to the crazed anti-Semite William Joyce (who was executed in 1946 for his seditious wartime broadcasts as “Lord Haw-Haw”). The famous BUF roughhouses—the Olympia rally of 1934, the Battle of Cable Street—continued to attract the worst sort of riffraff to the BUF cause, and to drive the more thoughtful and respectable elements away from the party. As early as 1937 Goebbels privately dismissed Mosley as a “busted flush,” and was on the lookout for new and more powerful allies in England.

Mosley and Diana were secretly married in 1936, at the Goebbels home in Berlin. Three years had passed since Cimmie’s death, during which time Diana and Baba (now known to her friends as Baba Blackshirt) had continued to enjoy Mosley’s company on a time-share basis. Thanks to its own excesses, the BUF was on its way to bankruptcy and disgrace; the wearing of Blackshirt regalia was outlawed and the BBC put a ban on appearances by Mosley that was not lifted until 1968. Mosley devoted his waning influence to a doomed campaign for peace, which he carried on right up to the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. In May of 1940, he was arrested under Defense Regulation 18b, a wartime suspension of habeas corpus, and sent to Brixton Prison.

For the time being Diana, who had a newborn baby, was left alone, but there was a growing movement to have this sinister character put behind bars as well: among those who insisted that she was dangerous and urged the government to lock her up were Diana’s sister Nancy and her former father-in-law, Lord Moyne. She was eventually arrested in late June and taken to Holloway.

Her privations, at least at first, were real enough, though it is hard to feel much sympathy for this privileged woman who happily condoned murder and concentration camps. At the end of 1941 she and Mosley, at Churchill’s personal request, were granted permission to be together, moving to the Preventive Detention Block at Holloway where they lived with four other couples. Sex offenders (“because they are so clean and honest”) were sent to do their housework, and Diana befriended a pretty bigamist. The prisoners were allowed to grow produce in the sooty soil; Diana, in her inimitably Marie Antoinette-ish tone, remarked that she “never grew such fraises de bois again.”

Mosley’s health began to deteriorate in prison, and in November 1943 he and Diana were released by order of the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, who told parliament that there was “no undue risk to national security” and that he had no wish to “make martyrs of persons undeserving of the honour.” They spent the rest of the war under house arrest, getting reacquainted with their various children, including the two new little boys who hardly knew them.

Diana was thirty-three when she was released from prison. The greater part of her life was still in front of her, but, as Dalley remarks, “what she and Mosley had lived for—their political dreams and ideals, their guiding sense of purpose—was already over.” She exercised her considerable energies in decorating and running their various houses in England, Ireland, and France, and in making life comfortable and pleasant for Mosley. He continued rather half-heartedly in politics, founding the Union Movement whose main platform was a campaign against non-white immigration. Diana became a part-time writer and editor, launching The European, the organ for the Union Movement, writing a book about the Duchess of Windsor and a group portrait of some of her interesting friends, Loved Ones, and editing Mosley’s “surprisingly readable” and successful autobiography, My Life (1968). Mosley died in 1980. In 1982 his son Nicholas published Rules of the Game, the first volume of a searching and honest biography of his father. It was a little too honest for Diana, who never spoke to Nicholas again.

Mosley and Diana remained defiant and unapologetic for the rest of their lives. The Holocaust was regrettable, but it was none of their doing: Diana professed a belief that “it was all part of the appalling price innocent people pay for a misguided war, and … it never would have happened if Britain and France had not declared war on Hitler”—a position, as Dalley comments, of “breathtaking illogic.” They simply “never,” as Diana herself wrote, “considered that Hitler’s excesses were anything to do with [them].”

It must be admitted that fascism, whatever subsequent high line Diana has chosen to take, destroyed the Mitford family. Lady Redesdale, under the influence of Unity, Diana, and Tom, became an enthusiastic convert to the creed. Lord Redesdale, who unconditionally loved and admired Tom, went along for the ride at first, but was soon repelled by events in Germany. His relationship with his wife never recovered, and from the early days of the war they lived apart. Unity was irreparably brain damaged by her attempted suicide in 1939 and lived with the bullet lodged in her head until she died from aftereffects of the wound in 1948. Tom, the golden boy, was killed in Hitler’s war; Jessica, who despised her sisters’ politics, became an exile and to some extent an outcast from the family.

Lady Gladwyn (formerly Mrs. Gladwyn Jebb) remarked in her diary in 1947 that “Both Diana and Oswald Mosley are evil characters, Lucifer fallen from Heaven, and he in particular has a sinister and almost hypnotic power.” Jan Dalley has valiantly tried to muster some sympathy for Diana, but in vain. Diana didn’t have the excuse of stupidity, like Unity; she was intelligent, cultivated, and intimately connected with some of the most brilliant and admirable people in England. Just as some people are mentally handicapped, she seems to have been morally so, and if, for a short, ugly time, she became a visible symbol of the rottenness at the heart of Western civilization, she has no one to blame but herself.

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