From ‘divine Caesar’ to Hitler’s lapdog – the rise and fall of Benito Mussolini

In 1919, an obscure political agitator called Benito Mussolini assembled a ragbag of Blackshirt diehards in the Lombard capital of Milan and launched the movement that was to become, two years later, the National Fascist Party. The party took its name from the classical Roman symbol of authority — an axe bound in rods, or fasces. Once in power, Mussolini introduced the stiff-armed Roman salute after the handshake was considered fey and unhygienic. At times he wore a richly tasselled fez and thrust out his chin pugnaciously for the cameras.

For all his posturing and demagoguery, Mussolini was widely admired in pre-war Britain, where Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail routinely carried flattering portraits of him. He was on amiable terms with King George V, moreover, who in 1923 publicly congratulated the dictator on his ‘wise leadership’. Mussolini was seen by many British politicians as a potential ally against Hitler’s Germany. To anyone disgruntled at all by parliamentary democracy, leftist poets, Jazz Age flappers and imagined Judeo-Bolshevik threats, fascism offered a ‘virile’ political alternative.