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