Books: Springtime for Mosley

(2 of 2)

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 3½ 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