August 13, 2003 (Wednesday)
Key West, Florida

NOW that I have announced that Joe Sobran is to be our featured speaker on the Ohio River dinner cruise, registrations for my Real History convention at Cincinnati on the Labor Day weekend are coming in well. Yes, the Internet is still out of control.

AN oddity, before I record the morning's main news. US television news channels last night reported that the FBI had arrested three men in New Jersey in a "sting" -- an appropriate name for the operation as it turned out. One of the three was identified as British "of Indian descent"; he had arrived at Newark, New Jersey, with an advanced Stinger-type ground-to-air-missile obtained from the Russians. The other two arrested were identified in the early bulletins only as "gem dealers" from Manhattan who were involving in financing the deal.

I have two questions for myself, there being nobody else to ask:

• Why was all reference to the "gem dealer" background of the two men omitted from later bulletins?
• Why, in the subsequent studio discussions on why terrorists were trying to buy such missiles -- duh, namely to bring down commercial airliners, or at least put the wind up air travellers -- was there no reference to the American Airlines plane from Idlewild airport that was "brought down" over Queens and Rockaway Bay a few days after September 11, 2001 killing all aboard? Police witnesses on the ground saw an exploison "the size of a small car" on the fuselage. Is that now just one more of the non-events arising from September 11, like the bringing down of flight UA.93?

[Postscript, 9:25 pm: [Jewish Telegraph Agency confirms it Jew nabbed in missile sting: A US Jew was among the three men arrested in the incident. ]

THERE is an element of predictability about the reaction of today's London press to the death at 93 of Lady Diana Mosley. The Daily Telegraph, which has come very heavily under Zionist influences since its seizure by the Hollinger Group and Conrad Black, gloats and jeers with all the mannerless verve of street urchins standing at the railings of a society church wedding, or of mudlarks at Cowes Week. They are aware that no matter how hard they scrabble and scribble, they will never achieve the fragrance, wit, and grace of this charming old lady.

How her life spanned the two centuries! Born Diana Mitford, she was sister to the famous and infatuated Unity, the crazed pre-war admirer of Adolf Hitler, who committed a long-drawn out suicide when our country declared war on Germany -- shooting herself in the head: a manner of death, necessarily unpracticed, which is less easy to perfect and perform than one would think, as Generaloberst Ludwig Beck discovered in July 1944 (the gun kicks upwards).

Diana's letters in response to my inquiries were always genteel and forthcoming; latterly, she commented helpfully on the draft pages of my Goebbels biography which described her wedding to Sir Oswald Mosley in the Goebbels villa in Berlin -- but the book also described how he had gone more than once to the Nazis, cap in hand, asking for subsidies for his rising British Union of Fascists, in the thirties, and she appeared to have been unaware of that; Dr Joseph Goebbels finally advised Hitler to stop giving, recommending that the British fascists should learn to do it the hard way, collecting subscriptions from the masses.

HOW had Mosley so attracted the hatred of England's Jewish community? He had raised a highly effective anti-war movement with policies that lay directly athwart their international interests. In July of 1939 he staged one huge final rally at the Earl's Court arena. He had many distinguished supporters. Among them, before the war, was none other than Frederick Lawton, later Mr Justice Lawton, who presided over the Convoy PQ.17 Libel Trial against me in 1970. In May 1940, under pressure from the trades union movement and the left-wingers in his government, Winston Churchill ordered Mosley's imprisonment without trial, along with Diana and thousands of their supporters; he stayed in jail until November 1943.

The diaries of Guy Liddell, head of B section of MI5, which I have recently been reading for my Churchill biography, are full of the hatred of the establishment for this man. Sir Norman Birkett, who headed the tribunal which reviewed each arrest, had Liddell spluttering with contempt as he released member after member of the interned party. One arrested man, questioned about the Black Shirt and Fascist Belt found by police in his closet, explained no doubt with a knowing wink that he needed the belt for his lumbago. He was released.

I know that I earned hostility from Mosley's lieutenants when I revealed in my Focal Point newsletter in 1981 that I had discovered in Benito Mussolini's files, or rather in Dino Grandi's, in the secret state archives outside Rome, the Italian documents proving that Mosley had also received large cash handouts from the Italian fascist government -- packets of foreign currency handed to his lieutenants on street corners in London by officials of the Italian embassy. Mosley had later always denied it, but here were the signed receipts, and secret dispatches recording every transaction.

Nicholas Mosley, Sir Oswald's son, was delighted when I gave him the documents for the hostile biography of his father. Well, so what?, I can hear him ask: both Tony Blair and Ian Smith are getting huge sums of money from Israel for their political parties, which is no better.

I also provided to Nicholas a word picture of the 1959 general election campaign at which Mosley stood for his new party at North Kensington, a district of London that was rapidly darkening in line with the dictates of the government of the day.

Night after night, we students from Imperial College went down the road to watch these skilled orators at work -- first the intrepid, gaunt, veteran fascist Jeffrey Hamm, warming up the street crowd, and then Sir Oswald himself, arriving in a big black Daimler cruising through the crowd, but not before another black limousine had mistakenly passed down the same street, accommodating what the crowd took to be a Black pimp and his young White hooker.

The speech was always the same for each of the three or four nights that Mosley spoke from the top of a loudspeaker truck -- the high point, eagerly awaited by the largely proletarian crowd, being his dismissive remark that these new immigrants had only the most limited of needs, "They can live off a tin of Kit-e-Kat a day."

Be that as it may -- and recent news stories from London have revealed that some immigrants prefer a more human diet -- Diana was as refined and precious as her raucous, wealthy husband was not.

It is not for nothing that that pampered and brilliantined twit, the historian Andrew Roberts, lets slip in his memoir on Lady Diana in today's Telegraph the revealing phrase that the BBC had once "inadvisedly invited" her to appear (on Desert Island Discs, for God's sake). The conformists always hate it when a genuine light is allowed to glow.

On the rare occasions when, the twits notwithstanding, television did invite her to appear, she sparkled. When that simpering but enjoyable poofter, the late Russell Harty, tried to interview her on his TV programme in the 1980s, she ran rings around him in the nicest possible way, saying what she wanted to say, and dancing and twirling lightly around all the traps that he and his producers had set.

DESPITE what the traditional enemies of the truth have often stated, I was never a member of her husband's party or indeed of any other; nor even a hanger on.

Perhaps "an interested observer" would describe it better; yes, that is what I have always been.

In fact Mosley's new British Union had first come distantly onto my horizon when I was at school, I forget how. They stood local councillors for the Brentwood election, and I liked one of their candidates enough, a Mr White I think, to help him go round the houses with his leaflets. That must have been in about 1954.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews claimed in one of their secret smear reports on me that I had "spoken at an Oswald Mosley rally at Imperial College in 1959." There was never any such event.

A few years later, when I was studying political economy at University College London, the students invited Mosley to lead a debate on immigration -- "This House believes that there should be some restriction on Commonwealth Immigration into the UK" -- a notion which was downright heresy at the time, but of course all those very laws have long since been put into place.

UCL could not find any student willing to second Mosley, a poor show indeed, and the student body approached me because of the reputation I had gained, though not earned, while at Imperial College; I agreed, but expressed reluctance as I did so: a reluctance that was well placed, I might add, because Mosley was given a standing ovation at the end of his brilliant speech while I, when I rose to deliver what was I think my first ever public address, was mercilessly hounded, howled down, and humiliated, and I had to face some very clever heckling indeed.

I had undoubtedly dragged defeat into the jaws of his victory and firmly wedged it there.

The debate ended in an annihilating vote. Mosley's face was black with rage, as he rightly blamed me. "I never wanted that Irving as a seconder," he rasped to the UCL officials. He had wanted his own son Max Mosley -- now a famous Formula One racing expert -- but university rules would not permit an outsider to debate.

It is interesting to read that "Lytton Strachey paid her court." He lived for many years in the house I now live in, in Mayfair.

Lady Diana Mosley's crime was not only to have admired, but to have slept with The Enemy, and now they are all there, jeering at her peaceful death at the appropriately named Temple de la Gloire in Paris. Hollinger's Telegraph even allows itself a sneering cartoon, of jackbooted mourners bearing a wreath. (Which inadvertently reminds me of the "hate-wreath" that Lipstadt's lawyers arranged to be sent to me on the day of my daughter's funeral, before the Lipstadt trial.)

Viel Feind, viel Ehr', the German proverb goes: many enemies -- much honour. With enemies like these, Lady Diana led an honourable life indeed.

Daily Telegraph obituaries of Lady Diana Mosley