My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyresounding applause. Resting his full weight on his fists clenched on the table, LordBirkenhead spoke like a bird for twenty minutes with little more than his customarylisp. It was astonishing, but both wife and friend had known the form.Birkenhead was an extraordinary man and his way of life even in that generation wasexceptional. He could support it without any apparent impairment of his faculties, buthis imitators could not. The wayside became strewn with young men who thought thatto be brilliant it was necessary to adopt his fashion. What was the secret of his PiedPiper appeal to the young? Wit and irreverence, always an irresistible combination tothose who themselves combine brains with youth. Discussing his favourite butt, whohappened to be his leader, Mr. Baldwin: 'The man has foot and mouth disease, everytime he opens his mouth he puts his foot in it'. When approached by a conspiracy toreplace Baldwin by Joynson-Hicks in a critical situation: 'Never swop donkeys whenyou are crossing a stream'. Looming, a sombre figure in his favourite corner table atthe Ritz, when greeted after a good lunch by a much bemedalled general who hadspent the war in the War Office: 'General, you have got a lot of medals'. 'Yes, Mr.Attorney, if I get any more I shall scarcely know where to put them.' 'Put them whereyou earned them, General, on your backside.' In F.E.'s company both Sandhurst andUniversity could delight; eternal summer gilds him yet, in memory.The long, leisurely luncheons and dinners, the drinking and the smoking of the bestwere all perhaps in the traditional manner of British politics at the end of theeighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, but the stress of life andparticularly of administration was then far less. Yet even in a man so brilliant as F.E. Ialways had the impression that while the performance of youth could be indefinitelyrepeated, with almost greater effect in age, it was not so easy with such a habit of lifeto absorb new knowledge or to learn new tricks, equally difficult for old dogs and olddrunks. There were plenty of people too in the classic world who lived in this way,but in that stressful and testing period they never achieved the heights of success bythe arduous contemporary standards. As Cato said on the eve of his suicide: 'Only oneman came sober to the overthrow of the State, but on that occasion the State wasoverthrown'.It always seemed to me that such habits in varying degrees became the stock-in-tradeof most of the statesmen during my early period in politics— an outstandingexception was Lloyd George—by reason of the extreme effort of mind and willnecessary to start a great speech. It is a terrible thing to face a large audience, whenboth you and they are stone cold; yet once you make the painful effort of warmingyourself up with your own exertion, your momentum soon develops effortlessly. Idrink coffee before a big speech, but if you start on coffee, you end in another fashionalmost as drunk as those who begin on alcohol. The choice is whether you start soberand end drunk, or start drunk and end sober. The former is much better, both for thehealth of the speaker and for the effect on the audience. The reason is that alcoholtaken before a speech replaces the function of the endocrine system, and as thealcohol wears off at the end, the speech falls rather flat. If on the other hand you startcold, the exertion of speaking gradually floods your system with adrenalin and youend in a condition of excitement which is communicated to the audience. The effort ofcalming yourself later in order to sleep requires an almost equal exercise of the will;some have been prematurely exhausted by reason of their failure in this respect. Iunderstand that science supports me to some extent in these reflections, which in my88 of 424