Fringe politics and politicians being somewhat in vogue at the moment, there were a few lessons for the likes of — oh, let’s call him George Galloway — to learn from a new three-part series called The Party’s Over (Sundays, Radio 4, 10.45pm, repeated on Wednesdays at 8.45pm).
The parties are political — Vanguard, the hardline Unionists of the Seventies that gave Northern Ireland David Trimble; Militant, the Trotskyite tendency that gave Neil Kinnock a headache during the Eighties; and, in the first programme, the many parties of Oswald Mosley, not least the one in his pants.
The story as told by Shaun Ley was of a man of contradictions. On the one hand he was a hero, the only government minister to resign over the issue of unemployment. On the other, he was last year named by a group of historians as the greatest British villain of the 20th century.
And anyway, the reason he quit Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Government in 1930 was not wholly on a point of principle, but because he thought he knew best how
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to deal with the ravages of the Depression. “Tory, Independent, Labour, New Party . . . Fascist,” was the way Tony Benn summed up — more in sorrow than in hatred — the career of a man who seemed to want to change things for the betterment of all, but only if he was the one who did best.
It was his love of himself, greater even than his desire to effect positive change, that drove him ever farther away from the nerve centre of British politics. The less people took him seriously, the more desperately he sought a place in the spotlight, in the middle of an empty stage.
These days, of course, his name is most associated with his time as the leader of the British Union of Fascists, and the violence that, Ley pointed out, had always tended to surround him, even before he took to wearing a black uniform and saying nice things about Hitler.
Was he a monster in the same way that Hitler was? He definitely had the potential — “He despised people too much,” said his biographer, Lord Skidelsky — but he was the main man in a party of one, backed up by thugs who were in it for the rucks. So lightweight was he as a political force that even the gentle, unworldly P. G. Wodehouse saw him less as a threat than as a vain, posturing buffoon ripe for ridicule as the cartoon fascist Sir Roderick Spode — whose Achilles’ heel was that he was the designer of a range of ladies’ frillies under the nom de sewing machine Eulalie Soeurs.
And of course Mosley was, if not quite a proper devil, at least a devil for the laydeez. “Do you think that if I had spent less time chasing after women I would have done better in politics?” he once creepily — and arrogantly — asked his son Nicholas, as though that were the only reason he failed. No, Ossie, it was because you were, as any football supporter could have told you, the merchant banker in the black.
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PS: Colin Murray had his first stint as the new host of Fighting Talk (Radio 5 Live, Saturdays, 11am) last week and the boy done good. I particularly liked the way he contrived a category — which sports hero had the panellists met and been particularly disappointed by — seemingly so he could exact personal revenge on a less than gracious Michael Owen. This was subjective broadcasting at its most heartfelt — perfect for Fighting Talk.