How long must a bloodline endure the misdeeds of its forefathers? Perhaps for as long as it continues to enjoy their notoriety. As the new BritBox series Outrageous charts the dazzling and controversial lives of the Mitford sisters, in particular the marriage between Diana Mitford and Oswald Mosley, the offspring of this pernicious pair are still reckoning with their radioactive legacy nearly a century later.
Everyone has a relative with outdated views, but few have had to deal with relations who were married in Joseph Goebbels’s drawing room with Adolf Hitler as the witness. Admittedly, Diana wasn’t the only Nazi-curious member of the family. Unity Mitford—conceived in the town of Swastika, Canada, with the middle name of Valkyrie—seemed destined to be a Nazi from birth, and eventually shot herself in the head after Britain declared war on her beloved Führer. But it’s the Mosleys who have left the most bothersome inheritance to their ancestors.
When Diana began her adulterous affair with Oswald in the early 1930s, the Mitfords’ father, David Freeman-Mitford, second Baron Redesdale, declared that none of the other siblings—Nancy (the novelist), Pamela (the farmer), Jessica (the Communist), Unity (the Nazi), Deborah (the future duchess), and Tom (the boy)—should speak to her. The relationship was a disgrace, not just because Mosley was the head of the violent British Union of Fascists (B.U.F.) but also because he was a cad and a bounder, having had affairs during his first marriage with his wife’s sister and her stepmother.
Oswald had begun his political career on the political left—although Leon Trotsky had not thought much of him, dismissing him as “an aristocratic coxcomb”—but he soon drifted to the far right. His creation, in 1932, of the B.U.F. and its paramilitary body, the Blackshirts, led to stiff opposition. And ridicule: Nancy Mitford satirized Mosley in her 1935 novel, Wigs on the Green, as Captain Jack of the Union Jackshirts. Later, P. G. Wodehouse introduced the Mosley-esque character Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts.
Since the couple’s Nazi sympathies were clear—Diana had flashed a Nazi salute during the playing of “God Save the King” at a rally in Hyde Park—the couple were decreed to be security threats and were interned in Holloway prison. Their two young boys, Alexander and Max, were separated from them for three years. The Mosleys were released from prison in 1943 but were placed under house arrest until the end of the war. When they were eventually given their passports back, in 1949, they quickly moved to the Paris suburbs, where their neighbors were the similarly Hitler-besotted Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Yet rather than disappear into obscurity, Oswald was drawn back to British politics. Just three years after the end of the war, he formed the Union Movement, a less popular version of the B.U.F.—albeit with the same lightning-bolt logo. It was feverishly anti-immigration, a pioneer in Holocaust denial (Oswald said concentration camps were created to hold “a disaffected population”), and surprisingly pro-Europe. According to the journalist Trevor Grundy, who was a young star in the Union Movement at the time, Oswald paid for the children of top Nazis to come to the United Kingdom “to learn English and spend time with his supporters.”
During these years, the Mosleys’ elder son, Alexander, stayed largely out of public view. As a teenager he seemed more interested in rock ’n’ roll than his father’s politics. And while he was happy to join members of the Union Movement throwing eggs at a rally for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958, his indifference to the cause was made clear when, halfway through the attack, he left his father’s followers and joined the leftist marchers (and his half-brother, Nicholas). Alexander studied philosophy at Ohio State University, telling a fellow student he had had to leave England because of the difficulties of his father’s past, and eventually settled in Paris, where he ran a publishing house that specialized in science fiction and design. He was married to Charlotte Marten, whose family had close links to the royal family.
The Mosleys’ younger son, Max, embraced his parents’ politics a little more keenly. In his teens he could be found daubing the Union Movement’s logo on walls, and when Oswald ran in the 1959 general election on a platform that included prohibiting mixed-race marriages, Max was with him. In 1962, when Oswald arranged a march through London’s heavily Jewish East End, with his supporters chanting “Jews out,” Max was arrested for fighting anti-Fascists, although he told police he was simply defending his father.
Effectively barred from mainstream politics by his name, Max embraced auto racing and went on to become president of Formula One’s governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile. His ruthlessness in negotiations was renowned. Together with his partner, Bernie Ecclestone, Max was responsible for turning what had been a somewhat parochial sport into the high-glamour event of today. “You see, I was born into this rather strange family,” he said in an interview later in his life, “and then at a certain point you get away from that.”
Nonspecific Military Jackets
However, in 2008, when Max was 68, the News of the World, a British tabloid, published a video of him taking part in what it described as a “sick Nazi orgy” involving prostitutes in Nazi uniforms engaging in sadomasochistic sex. Max sued the paper for breach of privacy and in court suggested the weight of his family history would never allow him to do what the newspaper had claimed. “All my life, I have had hanging over me my antecedents, my parents, and the last thing I want to do in some sexual context is be reminded of it.”
Max said that the prostitutes were actually wearing nonspecific military jackets, not Nazi uniforms. And while he admitted he was speaking German throughout—and one of the women could be heard saying, “But we are the Aryan race, the blondes”—he insisted it was not an S&M, Nazi-themed orgy, but rather an S&M, German-language, nonspecific-military-uniform orgy. The judge, while declaring Max to be “reckless and almost self-destructive,” declared the story was “not in the public interest” and ruled that Max’s privacy had been violated, awarding him $90,000 in damages and $675,000 in legal costs. Max went on to become a righteous campaigner for privacy laws.
Yet when it was revealed that in 2019 he had donated nearly $18 million to Oxford University in the name of his son Alexander (a talented economist and drug addict who had killed himself at the age of 39 because, some said, of the “taint on his surname”), the gift caused a furor—not because of Max’s sexual peccadilloes but, one professor suggested, because it was “tainted and dirty” by its association with Oswald. Max would end up shooting himself in 2021 after being given a terminal-cancer diagnosis.
While Max could not realistically enter politics, the same was not true for his nephew, Louis Mosley, the son of Alexander Mosley and the eldest grandson of Diana and Oswald. In the early 2010s he became a research assistant for the writer turned Conservative M.P. Rory Stewart (who is now a popular podcaster). He later successfully ran as a Conservative candidate in a council by-election in South Kensington and Knightsbridge, not far from Olympia Exhibition Centre, where his grandfather had once spoken to 10,000 saluting Fascists. “I really don’t know much about my grandfather’s career,” he insisted.
Louis went on to marry Nura Khan, an editor at British Vogue, and is now the U.K. head of the controversial data-mining firm Palantir. The firm was co-founded in 2003 by PayPal co-founder and J. D. Vance mentor Peter Thiel, and its involvement in helping governments with mass surveillance has invited accusations of Fascism. Thiel’s ambivalence toward democracy has not helped. No wonder that the recent convergence of Mosley DNA with New Right ideology has been catnip to conspiracists.
As for the other children and grandchildren of the Mitfords, they span the upper echelons of society just as their forebears had. There’s the legal scholar James Forman Jr. (the grandson of Jessica Mitford and the son of James Forman, onetime head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and the late supermodel Stella Tennant (a granddaughter of Deborah Mitford, she committed suicide in 2020). The descendants of Diana Mitford’s first marriage, to Bryan Guinness, heir to the brewing fortune, include the fashion designer and musician Daphne Guinness (her granddaughter) and the New Yorker journalist Nicolas Niarchos (her great-grandson).
Some in the family have tried to disavow their inheritance, but often this has caused Mosley’s descendants to close ranks. When the novelist Nicholas Mosley, Oswald’s son from his first marriage, to Lady Cynthia Mosley, wrote a critical but loving memoir of his father, titled Beyond the Pale, Diana never forgave him. She called the book “the degraded work of a very little man.... It’s all very well having an oedipal complex at 19, a second-rate son hating a brilliant father, but it’s rather odd at 60. Nicholas wants to get his own back on his father for having had more fun than he’s had.” Max, Nicholas’s half-brother, didn’t speak to him for decades.
For the Mosley descendants, a societal obligation to criticize their ancestors seems forever destined to clash with familial loyalty. In 2003, shortly after the death of Diana Mosley, her granddaughter Daphne Guinness wrote a letter to The Daily Telegraph, responding to an opinion piece that condemned Diana’s “disgusting, unchanged views.” Guinness wrote, “Whatever anyone may think of her views, she was not a hypocrite,” adding, “I am unequivocally proud to have been her granddaughter and consider it a privilege to have known her.”
But for Oswald Mosley’s great-grandson, Matthew Mosley, the head of development at Firebird Pictures, which produced Outrageous, there is less urgency to either defend his ancestors or to flagellate himself for their sins. “I’m not proud of [Oswald’s] legacy,” he says, but he sees his role in producing Outrageous as primarily about the creation of a cautionary tale, rather than wrestling with a blood curse. “I remember my uncle saying to me that ‘the sins of the father are visited until the third generation.’” For him, at least, the curse appears to have been lifted.
Outrageous is now streaming on BritBox, with new episodes coming out weekly until July 15
George Pendle is a Deputy Editor at AIR MAIL
