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To meet Oswald Mosley was a most unpleasant experience. You knew at once that you were in the presence of someone who had lost touch with everything except his own ego. So he bullied, so he lied, denying that he had been a willing agent of Hitler, that he would have proved a Quisling in the event of a German invasion in 1940, or that he had ever been an anti-Semite. On a television programme with him once, I read out some of the foul things he had said on platforms in the Thirties; his eyes turned red with rage, and I saw that he would have done violence to me if he could. If I did not suppress the book I had written about his sister-in-law Unity Mitford, Mosley and his lawyers threatened, they would not be responsible for the consequences. My lawyer advised me to hire security guards. Mosley’s wife, Diana, elder sister of Unity, flattered the fantasies of that monstrous ego. She told me that I would live to see the day when statutes of Hitler and Goebbels adorned the main squares of the capitals of Europe.
Tolerance carried to extremes converts from a virtue into the vice of indifference and apology. So it was with Mosley. A. J. P. Taylor romanticised him as a lost leader. In a biography some 30 years ago, Robert Skidelsky depicted him as Keynes, Nietzsche and Faust all in one. In the so-called Stockholm syndrome, the victim protects himself by extolling his victimiser, and in one among many weird examples of it Skidelsky wrote that for Jews Mosley’s anti-Semitic marches in the East End ‘must have brightened the pattern of a dreary existence’. (Subsequently Skidelsky revised such judgments.)
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