newsMitford Misfits – TV drama shows ‘gels’ like Diana and Unity just wanna have fun. Pity about the Nazis.
Unity Mitford and Diana Mosley with the Nazis they believed would protect them, and their class, from Communism
The literary critic Erica Wagner said in The Observer ( June 16, 2025) that obsession with the six Mitford sisters keeps the British bound to a fantasy vision of the past and that it’s time for them to ‘shove over’ because they’ve had their turn and it’s time to move on. How right she is, writes TREVOR GRUNDY, author of Memoir of a Fascist Childhood –
Oswald Mosley called them The Sillies.
If you have watched all six parts of Outrageous, the latest and longest TV contribution to the Mitford gals ‘industry,’ then (for the first time in your life) you might agree with the pre-war British Fascist leader.
Mosley got to know them all after the death of his first wife, Cynthia (nee Curzon) in May 1933.
Thirteen years before in May, 1920, King George V and Queen Mary, along with the King and Queen of Belgium, attended their wedding.
It was one of the social events of that year. The 24-year-old Oswald was already being tipped as a potential leader of the Conservative Party, even as a future prime minister.
The book on which the new TV drama about the Mitfords is based
His “cause” in the House of Commons where he’d been elected as the youngest MP (Conservatives) in the 1918 general election (to get anywhere, you had to have a cause, along with a suitable wife) was how best to promote the League of Nations.
His entry into royal circles came through his idealistic wife known as ‘Cimmie’ the daughter of Lord Curzon.
A sardonic verse summed up the man and the world Oswald Mosley was soon to live in.
My name is George Nathanial Curzon.
I am a most superior person.
My cheek is pink, my hair is sleek.
I dine at Blenheim once a week.
A Wykehamist and a former public schools boxing and fencing champion, the young Oswald Mosley found it easy to be a superior person just like his father- in- law. (Curzon never much liked Mosley and thought he might be Jewish).
After Cynthia’s death, Mosley married his mistress, the best-looking of the Mitford sisters.
He and Diana were married at the Berlin home of Dr Joseph Goebbels in 1936.
Hitler was guest of honour.
Mosley admired Benito Mussolini but disliked Hitler, probably because he was of low class but also because Diana adored the man.
She told her husband that he should be more like the German leader.
On their wedding night, Mosley blew up because his new wife clearly though more of Hitler than she did of him – – a scene done so well in Outrageous, the only one that Mosley watchers are not familiar with.
Diana Mosley , author and post-war editor and contributor to the London Review of Books
In May 1940, two of the other famous sisters – Jessica and Nancy – wrote to the British Government and said that both Oswald and Diana should be locked up and the key thrown away.
Had it not been for Winston Churchill’s strong affection for Diana, the fascist couple would have stayed in prison until the end of the war, not given early release (on Churchill’s order) in 1943.
Diana and Oswald with their two children Oswald Alexander and Max Rufus took Noel Coward’s advice recorded in a famous song and “sailed away” on a Mediterranean cruise in a family yacht.
After a period of post-war house arrest, they settled down, first in Ireland, then in France at a cosy pad close to Paris called The Temple of Glory.
It was there that Diana edited a monthly magazine called The European and where Oswald wrote his books, the most interesting ones called The Alternative and later Europe – Faith and Plan.
Their best friends in France were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
In 1948, Mosley made a come-back and formed Union Movement.
Unity Mitford – a deeply disturbed woman who tried to commit suicide at the outbreak of war against Germany
Young men who Mosley had met at Oxford University before the war wrote articles and visited Diana for light-hearted and very gay weekends in Paris.
Henry Williamson stayed a friend until Mosley’s death in Paris is December 1980.
His son by Cynthia, the novelist Nicholas Mosley, wrote a short obituary published in Time magazine saying “ . . . with his right hand he dealt with grandiose ideas and glory, the left hand let the rats out of the sewer.
I’ve read most of Nicholas’s books. It’s my guess that the only street (as opposed to lounge) Fascist he met in his life was his father.
As Outrageous reminds us, some rats have drawing rooms.
Wigs on the Green -Nancy Mitford’s parody of Fascism in Britain
As always, there’s next to no examination about the nature of fascism in Britain or Mosley’s ideas which (before he formed the BUF in 1932) attracted men like John Strachey, Aneurin Bevan, Harold Nicholson, Harold Macmillan and dozens on old Etonians and Harrovians who enjoyed fencing and boxing at the Black House in Chelsea (suppers and dancing at exclusive clubs in the evening) and who were nicknamed by the media the BIF (rather than BUF) boys.
We learn nothing about him except that he was good in bed and excellent at shouting in front of microphones.
Like fencing, going to bed with more than willing upper-class women was one of his hobbies.
So, if you really want to know about Mosley and the world of the Mitfords you should look elsewhere and not just the telly.
I believe that it’s a good time to turn to David Cannadine’s The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (Yale University Press New Haven and London, 1990) for help because this seminal work has a short section on the Mitfords and Mosley before he embraced fascism.
It’s worth reading unless you want to continue seeing the BBC’s usual portrayal of Mosley as a comic character, like Hitler in The Great Dictator.
It is a story about un-earned privilege and the arrogance that goes with it. It’s also about a ruling class in decline and a man who appeared to have everything and who wanted to turn the clock back while marching into the future.
In a chapter titled “Politics of Paranoia” author Cannadine says that Mosley’s Fascism was deeply rooted in his own rootless experiences as a landed gentleman.
Nicholas made a brave attempt to make sense of his father, Oswald, his mother, Cynthia, his step-mother, Diana, and the women the British Fascist leader called “the sillies.”
His ancestors were ancient but obscure country landowners, with 4,000 acres in Staffordshire which in the 1800s yielded £10,000 a year.
“They had been rebuffed by the citizens of Manchester in 1846, to who they had grudgingly sold out their market right for £200,000 and thereafter they had retreated to their Rolleston estate, a self-contained feudal enclave, where they effectively pretended that the 19th century, laissez-faire and the bourgeoisie did not exist.
It was in this artificial world of carefully studied hierarchy, a closed and charmed circle of reciprocal rights and duties, free of class conflict or capitalistic exploitation, that the young Mosley was brought up. But in 1920, it vanished forever, as the estate was sold, broken up, and given over to suburban development for Greater Manchester.”
Mosley found this “a terrible uprooting causing me much sorrow at the time,” he said in his biography My Life.
The loss of his family home and the semi-feudal life that went with it stay with and haunted Mosley for the rest of his life.
He hated liberalism, capitalism, laissez-faire economics.
He despised plutocrats, press lords, corruption and the middle class and he had no time for democracy, for socialism or for the mob.
And he came to detest Jews although he spent a great dela of time after his first marriage with very rich ones at their homes in the wealthiest parts of London.
In fact, some Jews saw Mosley as the best bet to stop a more violent form of Fascism/Nazism taking hold of the British.
But his his greatest scorn was directed at his own class which he never left.
He felt his class had given up but that he would rouse it and lead it with help of mainly working class men and women drawn towards him by his charisma and ability to put across wonderful words of hope at large indoor and outdoor meeting throughout Britain between 1933 and 194o.
Diana (left) and Unity do a Nazi salute during a Mosley Rally in Hyde Park in 1934
Diana also came from a family background that was one of textbook declining gentry.
The Mitford were of ancient lineage and held estates in the Cotswolds. The first Lord Redesdale over-spent and over-built and the second was no more careful. He built houses that he could not afford and he invested unwisely in Canadian gold-mines. In the 1920s and 1930s the land and the houses were sold off, usually at the wrong time when the market was depressed and fear haunted the gels locked in their crazy world of secrecy and private codes where things were either “ dreamy” or “ dreary” and where life was just one great joke.
“For all their robust indifference,” write Cannadine, “they were haunted by fear. “
As Diana recalled in one of her books, the burning question of their youth was ‘How should we manage to keep alive when we were grown up?’
Family members editing letters and helping to make films – the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?
They found answers.
Two of the daughters, Pamela and Deb, stayed loyal to their background.
Diana at 18 years of age married Bryan Guinness, a multi-millionaire.
While Unity and Diana and brother Tom embraced Fascism the eldest sister Nancy flirted with socialism and Jessica moved as far as she could away from fascism and became a sort of Communist married to Churchill’s nephew, the old Etonian Marxist Emily Romilly.
All these upper-class political thrill-seekers would have lasted about half an hour in Stalin’s Russia.
Their flight to Communism or Fascism/Nazism was a desperate attempt to secure leading roles in the movements they felt (or feared) would eventually take over not only in Europe but also in Britain.
And as Diana’s what will we do next question implies, the family background was that of textbook declining gentry.
By the 1930 as Europe skidded between Communism and Fascism, Lord Redesdale’s children were aware that their world was collapsing around them and that they would have to make their way in it.
“Outrageous” – Publicity blurb for the TV Mini Series Drama (2025). A co-producer was Oswald Mosley’s great-grandson, Matthew Mosley
Might Outrageous mark the end of the Mitford gels industry?
I hope so but don’t think it’s possible.
I fear that someone, somewhere is going to re-read Nancy Mitford’s idiotic book about U and Non-U ways of speaking and turn it into yet another class-soaked TV drama.
It will be about the secret code language and linguistic skills of six scatty birds who never grew up and their tyrannical father and his use of horse whips on those who ignored his cruel domestic orders, which made two of them – Diana and Unity – believe that Adolf Hitler was kind and gentle.