Betrayal - Oswald Mosley :
HISTORY CHANNEL
Saturday, 5 June, 1500 UK PREMIERE
Reviewed By Harry Pitt
Was Sir Oswald Mosley, aristocrat, distinguished soldier and airman in the 1914-18 war, Tory and Labour M.P. and, from 1932, leader of the British Union of Fascists, a threat to the security of Britain in the dark days of 1940? The contributors to this programme, including two whose parents were themselves Mosley supporters, believe that he was. They have produced a thoughtful and balanced account of Mosley`s career, focusing in particular on his interrogation by Norman Birkett in 1940 (Birkett was a distinguished barrister commissioned by Churchill to find sufficient evidence with which to imprison Mosley, his wife and some 700 of his followers ). Like Robert Skidelsky, whose biography of Mosley was published in 1975,five years before Mosley`s death, they have attempted to explain and understand as well as to condemn.
The evidence that Mosley was a traitor seems to this reviewer possible but less than conclusive. Marrying Diana Guiness, nee Mitford, in Goebbels` apartment in Berlin in 1936 with Hitler as a guest was not exactly brilliant P.R. from the vantage point of 1940 (or even 1936). He did receive financial assistance from Mussolini from 1932, but it must be borne in mind that Mussolini was regarded by successive British governments as a potential ally against Hitler until 1935-36. And in any case Mussolini lost respect for Mosley after his ignominious retreat from anti-Fascist opponents in the East End in the "Battle of Cable Street" in 1936. Mosley believed that war against Germany in 1939 was not in Britain`s best interests but he urged his followers to support the war effort. Diana had extensive contacts with high-ranking Nazis and her sister Unity attempted suicide when war broke out (one of the programme`s few flaws is an attempted reconstruction of this which owes something to Monty Python - another is the comment that Hitler was constantly at Unity`s side before her repatriation to Britain - as if he had nothing else to do in September 1939!) and Mosley himself was apparently in contact with pro-Nazi groups in Britain - but does this necessarily mean that he would have supported a German invasion? What seems certain is that Mosley and his followers had to be locked away for good political reasons. The Labour ministers who had just joined the government, in particular the Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, insisted on it. And no government could surely have taken the risk of leaving them at liberty. As Francis Beckett (son of a Mosley supporter) says, if ever internment without trial can be justified in a democracy, the circumstances of the summer of 1940 surely provide such a moment.
No reference was made to other opponents of the war against Germany in 1939-41, notably the British Communist Party which under Stalin`s orders was attempting to undermine the war effort because of Stalin`s pact with Hitler in August 1939.Let it be remembered that at the time of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, Stalin`s forces were overrunning the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and had already attacked both Poland and Finland - all with the enthusiastic support of British Communists who were writing slogans such as "Stop This Imperialist War" in British aircraft factories in 1940. Mosley and his kind were not the only traitors.
The Mosleys retired to a life of luxury in Paris after 1945 (an attempted political comeback on an anti-immigration platform in the late 1950s was a pathetic throwback) and lost the respect of many of their former followers who had sacrificed so much for the cause. The most moving moment in the progamme was the account of the suicide of just such a person who, astonishingly, turned out to be Jewish.