Round Table Discussion at the University of Reading, 18 September 2007, on Oswald Mosley’s New Party of 1931 and its relevance to twentieth century British politics
This session came at the end of a two day AHRC-funded conference on Oswald Mosley’s New Party. It was organised by Professor Philip Murphy and Dr Matthew Worley of the University of Reading.
[NB: We are still awaiting permission to quote the contributions of some participants. When this has been received, the relevant contributions will be added]
Philip Murphy
Let me just introduce the panel, we have two very distinguished historians of modern Britain, Jon Lawrence from Emmanuel College, Cambridge and Ross McKibbin from St John’s College, Oxford. Next to them we have the distinguished journalist and author Anthony Howard, former editor of the New Statesman, biographer of Rab Butler and most recently Cardinal Basil Hume. We have Shaun Ley from Radio Four. Shaun presents The World This Weekend and also recently presented a series of fascinating documentaries on fringe parties, of which one episode was devoted to the New Party itself. I am sure we will be able to talk about parallels of the New Party later on, in the twentieth century. We have Rob Wilson, Conservative MP for Reading East and currently shadow spokesman for Higher Education. So Jon if you could kick off with some remarks about what you have heard so far.
Jon Lawrence (Emmanuel College, Cambridge)
Thank you. This morning when I got up too early, I sat down and jotted a few ideas about what we were talking about yesterday, some of the big themes that I thought it would be useful to pick up again today. The first was one is the question of whether the period of charismatic leadership in Britain had come to an end by the time that Mosley was trying to play this card. Can we say that Lloyd George’s betrayal of the hopes at the end of the first World War, and MacDonald’s betrayal of the hopes at least of Labour supporters in 1931 were key milestones on this discrediting of the charismatic and demagogic leader in Britain? I do think that it is one of the stories of the twentieth century. For instance, when Churchill tries to play the card in 1945 it was perceived as going badly wrong for him and in 1950 and 1951 he strongly tries to play the card of the team man. So to think about that would be useful. The other obvious thing we talked about was when were the lessons of Europe being learnt in Britain? I do think that whoever suggested that really, it’s the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 that’s crucial, is right. I don’t think on the whole that people took seriously Mussolini and Italy as a lesson for Britain in the twenties, although the idea of being a tin-pot Mussolini was probably already quite a popular form of use.
Secondly, I wanted to raise an issue that makes us think of things I have been working on recently, which is the notion of whether we can say that Mosley missed the boat in terms of the fact that there had already been a transition to a more peaceable style of politics in Britain. Now we realise that this is not absolute transition: there were plenty of people going around hitting other people’s heads, not just in 1931 to 1935, but in the interwar period as a whole. But I would suggest that the meaning of hitting someone else on the head as a political gesture was changing in Britain. In an article that came out last year in Past and Present I suggested that in many ways politicians played a key role in distancing themselves from what I call the politics of disorder and disruption after the war; that there were fears about the brutalising effects of war, there were fears about the mob in politics, which took a new form after 1918. Politics really took a new form because it was no longer a male game, it was a mixed-sex polity. There was uncertainty about what to do with women electors. And I think the other crucial thing was class and the fact that Labour appearing on the stage as a major force destabilised the class dynamics of politics. It was no longer ‘toffs and roughs, and that’s the sort of thing they got up to’. Any gesture, any disorder in politics could be seen to be a revolutionary act. Politics was a class theatre, a class show, and that’s how it seemed to people in the twenties and thirties. So you couldn’t rely on ‘this is just a bit of exuberance and it will all pass after the election is over’.
But I have actually come to think that I was a little unfair on the British public, in the way that I had told that story. It seems to me that actually, on the whole, politicians did still connive, if only secretly, in disorder and violence, at least in the 1920s, when it seemed to be the sort of thing that you could do. And Mosley in Smethwick , Mosley in Ladywood is a good example. But so to is the fact we read Chamberlain’s diaries that Chamberlain organises counter violence, and he has no embarrassment about that. And the reason is, frankly, his constituents don’t. So we need I think to realise that the shifts that are going on maybe broader, maybe about the culture as a whole, not just things imposed on people. Having said that, I think Mosley still misunderstood fundamentally the role the politician was ever allowed to play in the politics of violence and disorder. That is to say it would never have been acceptable openly, overtly, to connive in violence, to organise violence. It had always been something done with a bit of money at the back of a pub through your intermediaries. Chamberlain writes ‘I know someone who’s got connections in the Bull Ring. He can sort something out for my meetings.’ So Mosley’s overt embrace of violence, the glamorising of it, not just the black shirts, but the whole paraphernalia, was a violent break with the political culture. It was the leader identifying themselves openly with ‘the mob’. It was obviously also, as someone was saying today, ludicrously imported, exotic, foreign. And that helped not one bit - the way that it so obviously imitated the emblems of European fascism.
I do think actually that we need to stand back a little and recognise the New Party and the BUF had no chance at all, and were mad. We need to recognise that there was no working class constituency these groups could appeal to. The organised working class was firmly in Labour’s grip. It couldn’t be taken from them. The unemployed could be individually - in desperation - reached and then lost again. If you read any of those accounts of unemployed life in the 1930s, people’s disillusionment with politics and with party comes through very strongly. And its only fleetingly that people take up a cause, only to drop it again, but most crucially, what Ross has worked on, that there isn’t a revanchist middle class, that could be mobilised. That’s what fascism needed, and as Ross has argued the economic policies followed after the First World War to rebuild the middle class, meant that, by the 1930s, it is a confident social group that has no need for fascism. Added to that, ex- servicemen are not an aggrieved block that can be mobilised in politics.
And that leads into my last point which was about party. I do think we need to be careful when we talk about the period 1930-33, as one of great flux for party and political identities. I think we exaggerate that. We talked yesterday about how it’s easy to read non-party identity or cynicism about politics as something which is much stronger than that. On the whole, I think in the British case, you are looking at low-level knowing cynicism about politicians and all that they do, and Mosley fits the bill better than most. He is a bigger figure of fun for most people, than your average politician, but it is a general blanket ‘knowing’ which doesn’t lead to serious disillusionment with the parliamentary system. I think there is a general acceptance that parties are the sort of things you have to have to make the parliamentary system work: they are not particularly desirable, but nor is there a fundamental anti-party mentality that can be mobilised. The period immediately after the First World War was one of instability and flux to a much greater degree than was 1929 to 1933. And actually we should remember how quickly Labour recovered from 1931; indeed how many votes Labour got in 1931. Although it lost a lot of seats, it still polled heavily, and by 1932/33, in the municipal elections it is back to where it would have been. You could argue that the National Government is always transparently also about party and that everybody knows that this is an alliance of parties, not just of politicians as individuals trying to come together to offer shared solutions. I don’t think it is about the discrediting of party.
Anthony Howard
I want to say something about Mosley himself. He has always fascinated me, because I don’t think he ever left the Right in terms of his social life. He once said, “talk Left, sleep Right”. All his girlfriends including, I am afraid, the two sisters of his wife, Cimmie, were sort of aristocrats. Again, I don’t know if you know that in St James’s there is a very posh and snooty club called Whites Club, and it’s the kind of holy of holies of the Right, Never, throughout all his troubles, was Mosley ever removed from the membership list. He was still on it throughout the war and throughout the fascist period. So I think we have to be perfectly clear that whatever impression he gave, in his way of life and his habits and all that kind of thing he always belonged to the Right. He did I think, have a Coriolanus complex - he thought that he alone could save us. And here I do feel a twinge of sympathy for him: 1931, Stoke on Trent, he got ten thousand votes, the second highest total of any New Party candidate, and what happens? Fast forward to 1959, Kensington North, two thousand eight hundred votes. So staggered is he that he cant believe it. He launches a petition to the high court saying there has been some mistake, but he gets very short shrift. Seven years later in Shoreditch and Finsbury -1966, I think I am right in saying – he got eighteen hundred votes. So it’s a tragic story.
Now I don’t think I ever met Mosley but I have listened to lots of recordings, and I think I saw him once in the flesh at a Moss Side by-election in Manchester in 1962. He wasn’t the candidate but his son Max Mosley, was the agent. He was, I think, a quite good speaker of an old fashioned kind - ham acting stuff, but he was quite good at it. But he wasn’t a gift in any way to the microphone or indeed to the television camera. He was rather humiliated once many years later when he appeared with Dick Crossman, who was no slouch at this kind of thing, on a BBC television programme. Dick really had him for breakfast.
David Owen was not adapted to the parliamentary system. He was a natural for the presidential system, and I suppose one might say that the same went for Mosley - he had a strong personality and he was a superstar of both the New Party and later the British Union of Fascists. But in a parliamentary system it is not much good just being a superstar. And here again cruel and unusual punishment comes in: in the days later when I saw him on East End marches and things, what a terrible come down it was for this great fencer, this handsome man, to be surrounded by people with cauliflower ears, wrestlers, boxers from the East End, this kind of thing. From the photographs you can see what it was that he had to go through, and I pay him the tribute that he managed always to put a smile on his face. But it must have been rather different, from the sort of John Strachey old Etonian he had been used to in the New Party days. He did, of course, believe that power came from the top, and that’s why he spent so much time, in my view, cultivating people like the owner of the Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere, and indeed without success really, Lord Beaverbrook. It is quite interesting that although the [SDP] Gang of Four much later on were also a proof of politics coming down from the top, my goodness me they understood that what mattered was to get a mass membership and therefore they worked hard on getting a membership - sixty thousand people - to sign up. No inclination on Mosley’s part ever to go for the mass membership. It never really attracted him: he thought that if you got figures of influence - local influence or national influence - they would do the trick for you. So in a way, I think, it was a very old fashioned version of politics that he preached. I imagine that in 1931 he thought that he would win in Stoke on Trent, his wife’s constituency, and obviously the New Party, rather like the former SDP, did think that it might come back with a respectable number of MPs. I suspect from the General Election of 1931, really it was all over for Mosley, and all the rest was just desperate remedies, a final kind of ‘gamblers throw’ of the dice to try and get the show back on the road. I am not sure I agree about Mosley being a figure of fun because he was funded by Mussolini. I think that money was important and that’s where the money originally came from. Later of course it came from Hitler as well, but the early big subsidies all came from the Mussolini regime. That must also, I think, have been slightly humiliating for him. So I think the story was really over with the failure of the New Party. As to whether the New Party had any real chance, I’ve almost been persuaded that it never did: the background conditions were wrong.
Mosley remains, I suppose, a tragic flawed figure. I don’t think that he ever quite realised how unpopular he was. Just a fragment from my own experience: in 1955, I became President of the Oxford Union - I think in the Hilary term. In the vacation over Christmas I thought, “How am I going to get a full house in the Hilary term?” It is always very difficult, you know exams going on, that kind of thing. I thought, I know what I will do, I will invite Sir Oswald Mosley. So sitting at home in Epsom Vicarage where my father was the Vicar, I wrote to Mosley. I think I had to send the letter care of the Union Movement. It went to Jeffrey Hamm and it came back saying ‘Sir Oswald will be delighted to accept’. It wasn’t of course what they do nowadays: he wasn’t going to be given the whole audience in a speech, he was going to take part in a proper debate. When I came back to Oxford at the beginning of the Hilary Term in 1955 I said what I had done to the standing committee of the Union and I had a total riot on my hands. They would not accept for one moment that this man could be invited - in 1955 we are talking about - to address the Oxford Union. And I, very shame facedly, had to write to Jeffrey Hamm and say I am sorry, I have to withdraw the invitation as my committee wouldn’t actually authorise it. So it showed how, late in the day, he was really a very, very - what shall we say? - inflammatory figure. Except, oddly enough, in upper class society. I read somewhere the other day, the Duchess of Devonshire saying that what she loved about Mosley was that he could laugh at himself. I nearly fell out of the chair when I read this, the idea that Mosley could laugh at himself seems to me to be highly improbable. But there it was, and her Uncle Harold [Macmillan] would go up to Chatsworth so he could meet “old Tom Mosley”. And so the establishment, the upper classes, stuck together with him. I think we are making a mistake if we don’t realise just what segment of society he belonged to, and maybe this is what hobbled him in democratic politics. It is also what gave him, his - what shall we say? - his reward in life, and I don’t think that he ever left the class politics we were hearing about earlier.