Spike Magazine

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race did indeed strike at the core of British political life
by the late 60s, and immigration became a key electoral
theme. But the UM’s abstract ideas of White European
Unity did not accord with the xenophobic mood ignited
by the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of the Conservative
Enoch Powell. The sentiment he unearthed and tried to
harness was as strongly anti-European as it was antiblack.
Those who didn’t like the “niggers” and “pakis”
didn’t tend to be too keen on “frogs” and “krauts” either.
The Mosleys were livid that Enoch had succeeded on
territory where they had failed. In an amusing glimpse
of the couple’s snobbery and delusion, Oswald dubbed
Powell a “middle-class Alf Garnett”, while Diana denounced
him as “far-right” as opposed to their “hard
centre”! A truly Fascist party was to gain from the racist
rhetoric of Powell. This was not the Union Movement
however. It was the National Front.
The NF was inspired by the same Nazi and Fascist
ideas that Mosley first fermented in the country. Its
first chairman was A.K. Chesterton, formerly a leading
figure within the BU and a close confidante of Oswald.
But its simplistic, xenophobic approach was far
more adept than the UM at tapping into the visceral,
base hatred that keeps such a movement going. It was
blacks and Asians who were getting the beatings and
firebombed houses now, with the added advantage
they were much easier to spot than Jews. The boot-
boys of the NF were every inch the descendants of the
BUY Stephen Dorril books online from and
Blackshirts before them, but they had moved on and
left their spiritual grandpa and grandma Oswald and
Diana behind. Bitterly jealous of the NF’s success,
Mosley remarked to his private circle, in a statement
beyond the parody of the most gifted satirist, that the
Front was “funded by Jews.”
The pair moved to France, and lingered on as bitter
remnants, their reputation rotting in a pleasing reflection
of their withered souls, cursing the cosmopolitan
conspiracies that had kept them from greatness, never
seeing the fault in themselves. No matter that most
saw a malevolent opportunist, in his mind’s eye he
would always be the great, lost, put-upon prophet.
Mosley would periodically attempt to reappear with
attempts at self-justification. Following one such
appearance on The Frost Report in 1967 interviewer
David Frost remarked, “He saw everything through
the distorting mirror of his own fantasises, and was
irretrievably consumed by them. He would never see
himself as others saw him.”
Oswald died in 1980, and the vaguely sympathetic
obituaries he received in certain quarters such as The
Times revealed for the last time that the solidarity of the
ruling classes will out in the end.
Dorril has produced the definitive Mosley biography,
superseding the absurdly sympathetic softsoaping
work of Robert Skidelsky, which centred on
Mosley’s Parliamentary career and treated the BUF as
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