On this day: Oswald Mosley dies

There were some 40,000 members of the BUF by the mid-1930s and for a period the party even had the support of the Daily Mail newspaper. But by the Second World War the party was attracting less support, and in 1940 the Home Secretary arrested and imprisoned Mosley and other BUF members – although his experience at Holloway Prison was somewhat more luxurious than that of most.

His political views made him famous, but so did his affair with the socialite Diana Mitford, who he eventually married in secret in 1936 at the home of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. One of the six guests at the wedding was the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler.

After the war Mosley, a disgraced figure, failed twice in attempts to gain a seat in parliament. In 1949 he and Diana moved to Ireland and then France, where he lived in relative exile until his death.

What the JC said: He claimed that he had never attacked Jews on account of their race or religion; his antagonism had been directed against Jewish interests which wished to embroil Britain and Germany in a ‘brothers’ war.” He drew a distinction between the “big Jews” involved in an “international conspiracy”…and the “little Jews” of no consequence who were of no particular consequence and could easily be dealt with. When these inconsequential “little Jews” daily had their shop windows smashed in the East end of London and elsewhere, bricks thrown through the windows of their homes where the Shabbat candles had neen lit and subjected to physical assault and abuse by street-corner fascist orators whipping up the mob, “the leader” saw no reason to intervene.

See more from the JC archives here