As I write this, voting for the EU Parliamentary elections is just entering its final round. By the time this review makes it to print, we will know if the British National Party have finally achieved their long-awaited first MEP. I admit to being rather worried. Growing up in a run-down factory town in Yorkshire inflicted enough BNP rhetoric on me to last a lifetime, and I don’t relish the idea of Nick Griffin clones taking a big metaphorical shit all over European democracy.
With these cheerful thoughts in mind, I was given a copy of The Pursuit of Laughter to review. The Pursuit of Laughter is a thematic collection of the personal diaries of Diana Mosley. Diana Mosley is interesting primarily because she was the wife of a certain Oswald Mosley – yes, that Oswald Mosley. I didn’t know much about the founder and head of the British Union of Fascists; we spent about half an hour on his party in my History A-Level, and how politically irrelevant it all was. I expected his wife’s diaries to shed a little light on this remarkable political failure, to display a more interesting side to a minor historical footnote of a man. I wanted to tut-tut over his reprehensible views, and shake my head sadly at her attempts to defend them.
Sadly, Diana Mosley didn’t give me much excuse for indignation at all – not because her husband’s politics weren’t reprehensible, or because her justifications aren’t pathetic. She just doesn’t talk about his politics much, and she doesn’t offer any justifications at all. For any detailed discussion on any of these, I had to turn to her brief portrait of her husband (fifty pages out of a six hundred page book). Even there, she just mentions he wasn’t anti-Semitic and he didn’t like imprisonment without trial. Not a very interesting Fascist at all, really, and seemingly at odds with his apparently cordial relationship with Hitler and Goebbels. Oswald’s political beliefs are discussed mostly when they affect his and Diana’s marriage (most interestingly, when he was thrown into prison during the War, and, ironically enough, was not tried). There’s a section with reviews of German (in some cases Nazi) books, but there’s not much juicy nastiness to be squeezed out of here, either.
So no political catharsis for me, then. Is the book worth reading anyway? Diana’s life is fairly eventful, and she describes it skilfully enough. There are quite a few interesting insights into upper-middle class life in the 1950s, and it all flows pretty well. If it had been written by someone with a less controversial spouse I’d be satisfied, if not inspired or enlightened. If you’re interested in 1950s Britain or you’re a politics enthusiast, pick it up at full price. If you’re neither of these, it’s still worth a go if you see it at a used bookshop or something.
A final word must go to Oswald Mosley himself, with his oddly prescient view of the Labour Party-
‘‘It looks powerful, but always breaks in your hand,’ he used to say. It was too deeply split within itself, something now obvious to anybody’.
