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Wednesday, August 13, 2003 [Death of
Lady Mosley]  Lady
Mosley, who died in Paris on Monday aged 93, was a
friend of both Winston Churchill and
Adolf Hitler, and decidedly more fascinated
by the Führer.
The third and the most beautiful of the six
Mitford sisters (daughters of the 3rd Lord
Redesdale), she left her first husband Bryan
Guinness to unite her destiny with Sir
Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union
of Fascists. The uncompromising temperament of the
Mitfords, combined with Mosley's rebarbative
politics, involved renouncing the social life of
which she had previously been a leading
ornament. Three of Diana Mosley's sisters would follow her
in forswearing England for a mixture of a man and
ideology. Nancy, her eldest sister, found in
Gaston Palewski the personification of her
drooling Francophilia. Unity became enamoured of
Hitler and shot herself at the outbreak of the war.
Jessica became a Communist and married an American
of that persuasion. In Diana Mosley's memory, Sir
Oswald was a figure of unequalled glamour. "He had every gift, being handsome,
generous, intelligent, and full of wonderful
gaiety and joie de vivre. Of course I fell in
love with him . . . and I have never regretted
the step I took then." She left Bryan Guinness in 1932, just as Mosley
was forming the British Union of Fascists. To the
horror of her family and friends - her father
forbade her younger sisters to see her again - she
set up house with her two small sons in Eaton
Square, and placed herself at the Leader's
disposal. Yet it was for an uncertain future that
she had cast herself away. Mosley's first wife
Cimmie, Lord Curzon's daughter, was still
alive; and Mosley showed no disposition to leave
her. "I never dreamed of marrying him," Diana
remembered. It was as though the fairy princess had been
carried off by the demon king. As Diana Guinness,
she had been a leader of a set which included
Augustus John, the Sitwells, Henry Yorke,
Evelyn Waugh, Roy Harrod and Robert
Byron. Lytton Strachey paid her
court. Her photograph regularly stared from the covers
of the society weeklies; her portrait was painted
again and again. The face always seemed to come out
the same - large, calm, and staring vacantly into
space. "She was getting like that in real life
too," her sister Jessica acidly observed. The death
of Cimmie Mosley from peritonitis in May 1933 made
possible a lifetime commitment to the Leader of the
Blackshirts, which she would honour through every
adversity. At first, it seemed that she might keep
him within the bounds of respectability. "The
Leader is so clever and in his way so civilised and
English," she explained to Roy Harrod in 1933,
"that [his Blackshirts] could not be
comparable to the German movement. But if everyone
of sensibility, charm and intelligence shuns him,
there is definitely a danger that he will come to
regard those virtues as vicious and the possessors
of them as enemies." But that same year, on the invitation of
Hitler's stooge Putzi Hansfstaengl, Diana
Guinness visited Nazi Germany. For her sister
Unity, who accompanied her, the holiday was the
beginning of an obsession that would destroy her
life. Diana was also deeply impressed, and ever
afterwards disposed to ignore what she heard of
anti-semitism and concentration camps. Unity
Mitford finally succeeded in making Hitler's
acquaintance in January 1935, and in March proudly
introduced him to her sister. Diana Guinness, in
the full flower of her beauty, made a considerable
impression; she herself was dazzled. "His eyes were
dark blue," Diana rhapsodised about Hitler, "his
skin was fair and his brown hair exceptionally
fine. In certain moods he could be very funny. He
was extremely polite towards women. He was the most
unselfconscious politician I have ever come across.
He never sought to impress, he never bothered to
act a part. If he felt morose, he was morose. If he
was in high spirits he talked brilliantly." Later in 1935 Irene Ravensdale, sister of
Mosley's first wife, found the picture of Hitler in
Diana Guinness's house at Wootton, in
Staffordshire, "particularly painful". Certainly,
Diana's partiality for the Führer quite outran
that of Mosley, who later in life would refer to
Hitler as "a terrible little man". On October 6 1936, two days after the
Blackshirts' humiliating withdrawal from Cable
Street, Diana secretly married Mosley in Berlin - a
wedding arranged under the auspices of Dr
Goebbels, whose wife Magda was a friend of
Diana's. Hitler came to dinner after the wedding,
presenting a picture of himself in an eagle-topped
silver frame. Afterwards, the newly-weds had a
fierce quarrel: "We went to bed in dudgeon." Diana Mosley continued to visit Germany
frequently, being involved in negotiations to set
up an independent radio station to broadcast to
Britain from Heligoland; Mosley hoped that this
scheme would finance his movement. She had several
private late-night meetings with Hitler in the
Chancellery, and he invited her to Bayreuth. Mosley, meanwhile, took the line that Britain
should stay out of any conflict with Germany, in
order to preserve the Empire by leaving Hitler a
free hand in Europe. As Hitler swept through France
in May 1940 Mosley was arrested and imprisoned in
Brixton under Defence Regulation 18b, which
empowered the Home Secretary to detain in prison
"any particular person if satisfied that it is
necessary to do so". In fact, Mosley had frequently declared he would
fight for his country in the event of an invasion.
But there were many politicians, particularly in
the Labour Party, who had scores to pay off. By
this time the Mosleys were such pariahs that when
Diana gave birth to their youngest son in April
1940 many Britons were inspired to write that they
were coming to pour vitriol over her babies. The Mitfords were cousins of Clementine
Churchill, the Prime Minister's wife, and as a
girl Diana Mosley used to stay with the Churchills
at Chartwell. This did not prevent her imprisonment
in Holloway at the end of June 1940. The conditions under which Diana was imprisoned
were ghastly, but she was never one to sue for
mercy. Interviewed by a Home Office Advisory
Committee under Lord Birkett in 1940, she
put her worst foot forward. She admitted that she
would like to replace the British political system
with the German one "because we think it has done
well for that country". Did she approve of the Nazi
policies against Jews? "Up to point," she declared.
"I am not fond of Jews." When her lawyer asked
if she knew anyone in the government who might
help, she gave further hostages to fortune.
"Know anyone in the government?" she cried. "I
know all the Tories beginning with Churchill.
The whole lot deserve to be shot." This was reported to Churchill, who was not
amused. Not until December 1941, after the
intervention of Diana's brother Tom with the Prime
Minister, was Mosley allowed to join her in married
quarters at Holloway. After two more years, in
November 1943, they were both released on grounds
of Mosley's health, and placed under house arrest
until the end of the war. Evelyn Waugh, who encountered Diana Mosley when
she was just out of prison, told his daughter that
he was shocked to observe that his friend was
wearing a swastika diamond brooch. But then the
Mitfords had been brought up to pay scant attention
to the opinion of others. 
DIANA Freeman-Mitford was born on June 17 1910 into
a family which her sister Nancy would immortalise
in Love in a Cold Climate. Their parents,
Lord and Lady Redesdale, featured as Uncle Matthew
and Aunt Sadie. The family first came to prominence
in the 18th century, when John Mitford was
Speaker of the House of Commons and (as Lord
Redesdale) Lord Chancellor of Ireland. His son was
raised to an earldom in 1877, but nine years later
both titles became extinct.
The Redesdale title would be revived for a
cousin, Bertie (pronounced "Barty") Mitford, whose
great-grandfather was William Mitford,
celebrated as the author of The History of
Greece. Bertie's second son, David, Diana's
father, married Sydney, daughter of "Tap" Bowles,
the founder of Vanity Fair and The
Lady. Their only boy, Tom, was killed in Burma
in 1944. Of the more orthodox daughters, the
second, Pamela, married Professor Derek
Jackson; and Debo, the sixth, is the present
Duchess of Devonshire. Diana remembered her father
with a great deal more affection than Nancy or
Jessica did. "Not only did he make us scream with
laughter at his lovely jokes," she wrote, "but he
was very affectionate. Certainly he had a quick
temper, and would often rage, but we were never
punished." In 1919 Lord Redesdale sold the house
his father had built at Batsford, Gloucestershire,
and moved to Astall Manor in Oxfordshire. The
children loved it, and Diana, "in a supreme effort
to make money", kept chickens, pigs and calves. A
succession of governesses - Diana thought 15 -
abandoned the attempt to instil some education.
Nevertheless, Diana read avidly, and though
regarded as soft-hearted by her sisters imbibed her
share of the family's tough style. "Do try to hang
on this time, darling," Jessica remembered her
saying when riding. "You know how cross Muv will be
if you break your arm again." The idyll at Astall did not last; after six
years Lord Redesdale decided to build a new house
on the hill above Swinbrook. It turned out to be a
monstrosity, but for the children there was the
compensation that he also bought a large house in
London, at 26 Rutland Gate. In 1926 Diana was sent
to stay in Paris, where she attended a day school
and in six months learnt more than she had during
six years in England. Evelyn Waugh thought that her beauty "ran
through the room like a peal of bells". Jim
Lees-Milne, who was a friend of Tom Mitford's
at Eton, remembered her as "the most divine
adolescent I ever beheld: a goddess, more
immaculate, more perfect, more celestial than
Botticelli's sea-borne Venus". In 1928 this vision
came to the attention of Bryan Guinness, and within
weeks they were engaged. Lady Redesdale objected
strenuously to her prospective son-in-law on the
grounds that he was "so frightfully rich". Nancy
Mitford thought he was perfectly all right, but
could not imagine why her sister should want to
marry him. Eventually, though, consent was
granted, and the wedding took place on January
30 1929. Apart from her two sons, the most notable
achievement of Diana Guinness's first marriage was
a spoof exhibition of the works of a mythical
artist called Bruno Hat. Brian Howard produced most
of the paintings; Evelyn Waugh wrote the catalogue
and Tom Mitford impersonated Hat. At Biddesdon,
their country house near Andover, Diana was able
for the first time to employ her talent for
interior decoration. At the end of her life she
expressed gratitude for having lived in three
beautiful houses: Biddesdon, Wootton and, from 1950, the
pretentiously entitled (though not by the Mosleys)
Temple de la Gloire on the outskirts of Paris; the
house was known to their foes as "The Concentration
of Camp". After the Second World War, the Mosleys
lived on a farm at Crowood, near Ramsbury in
Wiltshire. Though largely ignored by the local
residents, they appeared content in their
self-sufficiency; whatever else might be said about
them, no one could deny the success of their
marriage. In 1951 Mosley, now obsessed with the
ideal of creating a united Europe, decided to leave
England and divide his time between the Temple de
la Gloire and a house he had bought in Galway. "You
don't clear up a dungheap from underneath it," he
commented of his decision to leave England. In
France, Diana Mosley edited The European, a
magazine that boasted contributions from Ezra
Pound, Henry Williamson and Roy
Campbell. She herself contributed reviews and
comment, showing a sharpness that would not have
shamed her sister Nancy. Her loyalty to Mosley remained absolute, though
she did venture to suggest, when he stood for North
Kensington in 1959, that the use by his supporters
of such terms as "fuzzy wuzzies" was not likely to
bolster his credentials as a serious politician. In
Paris, the Mosleys discovered that they had much in
common with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and in
1980 Diana published a book on the Duchess. If Diana Mosley never enjoyed the literary
success of her sister Nancy, she was undoubtedly
happier. Thrusting aside all remembrance of Nancy's
betrayal of her during the war, Diana proved the
main consolation in her sister's painful and
protracted final illness, which ended in 1973. But
she never made her peace with Jessica, who had
declared at the end of the war that the Mosleys
should be thrown back into prison. "She's a rather
boring person really," Diana concluded. Sir Oswald Mosley died in 1980, and a year later
Diana Mosley suffered from a brain tumour. It
turned out to be benign and was operated upon
successfully. While convalescing she was visited by
Lord Longford. "Of course, he thinks I'm Myra
Hindley," Diana remarked. Although her book of
memoirs, A Life of Contrasts (1977), was
deliberately provocative, most of those who met her
found her a delightful companion, while to her
sisters' children she was Aunt Honks. On one
subject, however, she remained incorrigible. "They will go on persecuting me until I say
Hitler was ghastly," she acknowledged. "Well,
what's the point in saying that? We all know he was
a monster, that he was very cruel and did terrible
things. But that doesn't alter the fact that he was
obviously an interesting figure. It was fascinating
for me, at 24, to sit and talk with him, to ask him
questions and get answers, even if they weren't
true ones. No torture on earth would get me to say
anything different." "I was very fond of him," she admitted in an
interview in 2000. "Very, very fond." Of her sons from her first marriage, the elder,
Jonathan, is the 3rd Lord Moyne, while the younger,
Desmond, founded the Irish Georgian Society. There
were two sons from her second marriage; the
younger, Max, is President of the Federation
Internationale de l'Automobile.Related reports
Diana Mosley,
unrepentantly Nazi and effortlessly
charming By Andrew Roberts THE death of Diana Mosley
brings to an end one of the most curious questions
of British upper-class etiquette: how does one deal
socially with an unrepentant Nazi? One of the funny, charming, intelligent and
glamorous Mitford sisters; a denizen of the "Hons'
cupboard"; a dedicatee of Vile Bodies; a beautiful
woman whom Churchill called "Dinamite"; an inspired
interior decorator; a steadfast friend to a wide
galère (including some Jews); a fine
autobiographer and loving mother; yet Diana Mosley
was also a woman who could - when she was
inadvisedly invited to appear on Desert Island
Discs - describe Adolf Hitler in almost
wholly positive terms. The social problem was made
easy for most people of her acquaintance during the
Second World War because of her long incarceration
in Holloway prison for her fascism. Lest anyone still believe that her imprisonment
was somehow undeserved, let them read Jan
Dalley's generally sympathetic 1999 biography
of Lady Mosley, in which it is recorded that,
during a Hyde Park rally in October 1935, she
silently gave the Heil Hitler salute when the rest
of the crowd was singing God Save the King.
And that was before she married Sir Oswald Mosley.
Her interrogation by Norman Birkett's
Advisory Committee in 1940 - the transcripts of
which were finally released in 1983 - confirmed
that it had been quite right to recommend that she
stay in jail, especially after she told them that
"she would like to see the German system of
government in England because of all it had
achieved in Germany". The key, inescapable
difference between Diana Mosley and the scores of
other pre-war pro-Nazis who had changed their
political allegiance once the concentration camps
yielded up their incontrovertible evidence of the
profound evil of Hitlerism was that she was hooked
for life. As the writer Michael Shelden has
diagnosed it: "There was no going back; Diana
Mosley's stubbornness and aristocratic pride made
her reluctant to admit that she had made a profound
mistake." Indeed, even that puts it too mildly. Lady Mosley fully appreciated the frisson that
would shoot through a lunch table when she made
some fond reference to a Nazi leader. Nor did it
end there. She helped to finance the British Union of
Fascists until the death of its organiser,
Jeffrey Hamm, in 1994, often attending their
annual dinners. In letters I received from her in
1992, she took particular pleasure in the way that
Czechoslovakia, which she wrote "couldn't last in
its 1938 form", was splitting in two, just as
Hitler had succeeded in forcing it to do at Munich.
She even recently wrote to The Spectator to
argue that her late husband "was not an
extremist". The problem of how to deal socially with Lady
Mosley was not made that much harder after her
release from Holloway in 1943, especially once she
went to live in France after the war. British ambassadors were instructed, as if they
really needed to be, not to invite the Mosleys to
the embassy, and, other than the Duke and Duchess
of Windsor, they made few new friends. But old
friendships and ties of blood, especially through
the children of Diana's first husband, Bryan
Guinness, meant that they were never short of
visitors to their beautiful house outside Paris,
Temple de la Gloire, which was originally built for
General Moreau in 1800 to commemorate the battle of
Hohenlinden. When I visited the Temple to interview
Diana Mosley for a book I was writing about
Churchill's contemporaries, I was subjected to the
full force of her superb Mitfordesque charm, and I
am ashamed to say that I loved it. There was not a trace of pomposity to her - "How
snooty I looked in those days", she said of a
photograph of herself - nor of the boorishness one
expects (and rather hopes for) from fascists. Yet
she never failed to appreciate the effect of
occasionally flashing a view of the cloven hoof.
"Hitler was attractive," she told me, "though not
handsome, with great inner dynamism and charm.
Charm can mean so mean so many things; I don't
suppose I've met anyone quite so charming. It might
be just that he was powerful, I suppose, but it
seemed more than that." I asked about the
Holocaust, of course, expecting a David
Irving-style refutation, but was astounded not
to get one. "I'm sure he was to blame for the
extermination of the Jews," she answered. "He was
to blame for everything, and I say that as someone
who approved of him." Was that use of the past tense an admission? Had
she in fact changed her mind about the Führer?
So I asked her again, hoping that I would not have
to think this beautiful aristocrat a monster
because of her disgraceful views. When she married
Mosley in a civil ceremony in Joseph Goebbels's
"ordinary, middle-class drawing room" in Berlin in
1936, the only guests (besides the witnesses) were
Hitler and Goebbels himself. Fifty-two years
and a world war later, I wondered, what she would
do if the Führer walked into the room? "I
should have to be pleased," she replied, "and ask
him how it had been in Hell, or Heaven, or wherever
he'd been." There it was; the same disdain for equivocation
that later led her to talk to Sue Lawley about
Hitler's lovely blue eyes, the same inability to
admit that the central fact about her life had been
disastrous, that fascism was evil and that the man
she had worshipped - Oswald Mosley, "Tom" to his
friends, "Kit" to her - had wasted his undeniable
talents upon a foul lie. There were several people
who told me in the course of my researches -
including another of Oswald Mosley's lovers, Lady
Alexandra "Baba" Metcalfe - that Diana was
the more dangerous of the couple, because she was
more fanatical than her husband back in the 1930s.
Her own sister, the novelist Nancy Mitford, told
the Home Office as much in 1940. I like to think
that she stuck to her repulsive views out of love
for her husband and because her beloved sister
Unity had attempted to commit suicide for them on
the outbreak of war, and that to denounce them
would have been a betrayal of her. Whatever the reason, Diana Mosley took her
disgusting, unchanged
views to her grave, and now she can ask the
Führer herself how he has fared "in Heaven, or
Hell, or wherever he'd been".
Blonde who
captivated Hitler and spent Philip Delves Broughton looks
at the life of the woman who was once the poster
girl for English fascism IF you believed Diana Mosley's friends, she was
simply incapable of lying. She could have begged
forgiveness for supporting Hitler, blaming it on a
dilettantish crush. She could have said she was
blinded by love for her husband into saying and
doing things she would later regret. But she did
neither. She owned up. The Nazis, she often said, turned out to be a
disappointment. But that could never erase the fact
that they had once seemed a very good thing to a
great many people. Diana Mosley, she wanted you to know, was not
the only one who had thought this way. Just the
only one to have to live the rest of her life with
the consequences. She died on Monday in Paris in her flat on the
Rue de L'Universite, overlooking the gardens of the
Ministry of Defence, a stone's throw from
parliament. She had been in bed since suffering a mild
stroke a week earlier. Her death, according to the
death notice posted by her sister, the Duchess of
Devonshire, was "peaceful". She is expected to be
buried at Swinbrook, her family's home in
Oxfordshire. It never helped Diana Mosley's
reputation that she looked like a Nazi fantasy
sprung to life: tall, blonde and with a cool
blue gaze that captivated everyone from Evelyn
Waugh to the Fuhrer. Her elongated vowels and
apparent disregard for what people thought of
her compounded her public image as a
cold-hearted aristocrat. She was the poster girl
for English fascism, symbolising how morally
rotten the upper classes had become. Later in life, however, she assiduously defended
her own and her husband's reputation. Last year, the Public Record Office released
Secret Service documents from just before the
Second World War which called her "a public danger"
and "far cleverer and more dangerous than her
husband and will stick at nothing to achieve her
ambitions". The day after an article appeared in this
newspaper reporting the claims, a fax arrived in
The Daily Telegraph's Paris office inviting
me to hear her side of things. "Oh, it's too wonderful really," she said,
rocking back on her pale blue sofa and reading the
allegations. But after this casual brush-off, she
launched into a detailed account of why exactly the
documents were wrong. Though she could barely hear,
she never lost her train of thought. She explained
why her husband had so many guns when he was
arrested - they were for hunting and shooting, not
for launching an armed coup; she said why he had
been so prescient about the need for European
integration and bemoaned the lack of politeness in
contemporary politics. When her husband was
politically active, she said, they frequently
argued with communists in political settings but
"if you met them at dinner, you wouldn't have a
row". She said she despised the kind of "crusty old
Tory nationalism" preached by extreme Right
demagogues such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader
of the French National Front, and that Sir Oswald
was never "extreme Right". Her sometimes blithe
dismissals of her past and those who demanded that
she apologise for it concealed a determination that
her personal history be properly understood,
however difficult that might be. She called her 23 grandchildren a "sort of
cushion in one's life really", against both old age
and the still frequently heard taunts that she is
an unrepentant Nazi. Since her husband's death in 1980, she remained
in Paris, writing book reviews and taking brisk
walks along the Seine. She lunched frequently in
Tante Marguerite, an immaculate French restaurant
close to her flat and opposite the offices of
French Vogue magazine. The staff there would
be fascinated to see her walking past in her old
Dior and Balenciaga outfits, cinched at her
miniscule waist. Few, however, knew quite how
controversial she had once been. During the 1930s, when Britain first became
fascinated by the Mitford sisters, their eccentric
private lives and shifting political allegiances,
one newspaper ran the headline: "Mixed up Mitford
girls still confusing Europe." Jessica Mitford had just run off with
Churchill's nephew, Esmond Romilly, to fight
with the Communists in the Spanish Civil War; Diana
and Unity were swooning over Hitler, and Nancy was
outraged with them and their mother, Sydney, for
admiring the Nazis. In her memoirs, A Life of Contrasts,
Diana Mosley writes about this time and the
Nazis she met as if they were guests at a country
house party. Asked once what she best remembered
about Hitler, she said: "The jokes!" At the time of
her internment, she said her main concern was
looking after her two infant children. Politics was
a single thread in the far broader weave of her
life as a wife, mother and sister. This thread, however, made her a figure of
public scorn and soured relations with her sisters
Nancy and Jessica who were disgusted by her Nazism
and anti-Semitism. Diana and Jessica did not communicate after the
war until the 1970s, when Nancy was dying of cancer
in Paris and they shared the responsibility of
looking after her. Apart from her family, Diana Mosley had a large
circle of admirers, both English and French, who
were as tantalised by the prospect of a
recollection of Hitler as they were captivated by
her charm. In her memoirs, republished last year,
she complained that Paris no longer had the best
dressmakers but that at least it was "beautiful,
bright and clean". She wrote: "Most of my friends
are dead but, with those who remain, and my sons,
and above all Debo [the Duchess of
Devonshire] with her generous and loving
nature, I am fortunate beyond words." She said her
90th birthday was her "last farewell" and quoted
Hillaire Belloc's response when asked what
made life worth living: "Laughter and the love of
friends." But as one American reviewer put it when writing
about Diana and the Mitfords, quoting Nancy: "Alas
one's life." © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited
2003. 
David
Irving: A Radical's Diary-
Diana Mosley
- The last bright young thing
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