Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, 6th Baronet (16 November 1896 – 3 December 1980), was a British aristocrat and politician who rose to fame during the 1920s and 1930s when, having become disillusioned with mainstream politics, he turned to fascism.

[1][2][3][b] After military service during the First World War, Mosley was one of the youngest members of Parliament, representing Harrow from 1918, first as a Conservative, then an independent, and finally joining the Labour Party.

Fascist violence under Mosley's leadership culminated in the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, during which anti-fascist demonstrators including trade unionists, liberals, socialists, communists, anarchists, and British Jews prevented the BUF from marching through London's East End.

He lived for many years at his grandparents' stately home, Apedale Hall in Staffordshire, and was educated at West Downs School and Winchester College.

[13] In January 1914, Mosley entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, but was expelled in June for a "riotous act of retaliation" against a fellow student.

He transferred to the Royal Flying Corps as a pilot and air observer,[16] but while demonstrating in front of his mother and sister he crashed, which left him with a permanent limp, as well as a reputation for being brave and somewhat reckless.

[20] Mosley spent large amounts of his private fortune on the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and tried to establish it on a firm financial footing by various means including an attempt to negotiate, through Diana, with Hitler for permission to broadcast commercial radio to Britain from Germany.

He soon distinguished himself as an orator and political player, one marked by extreme self-confidence, and made a point of speaking in the House of Commons without notes.

Leslie Hore-Belisha, then a Liberal Party politician who later became a senior Conservative, recorded his impressions of Mosley as a platform orator at this time, claiming that his "dark, aquiline, flashing: tall, thin, assured; defiance in his eye, contempt in his forward chin".

Together, Oswald and Cynthia Mosley proved an alluring couple, and many members of the working class in Birmingham succumbed to their charm for, as the historian Martin Pugh described, "a link with powerful, wealthy and glamorous men and women appealed strongly to those who endured humdrum and deprived lives".

He was close to Ramsay MacDonald and hoped for one of the Great Offices of State, but when Labour won the 1929 general election he was appointed only to the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a position without portfolio and outside the Cabinet.

He was given responsibility for solving the unemployment problem, but found that his radical proposals were blocked either by Lord Privy Seal James Henry Thomas or by the cabinet.

Furthermore, the memorandum laid out the foundations of the corporate state which intended to combine businesses, workers and the government into one body as a way to "Obliterate class conflict and make the British economy healthy again".

"[36]According to Lady Mosley's autobiography, thirty years later, in 1961, Richard Crossman wrote: "this brilliant memorandum was a whole generation ahead of Labour thinking.

"[39] In 1992, the then UK prime minister, John Major, examined Mosley's ideas in order to find an unorthodox solution to the aftermath of the 1990–91 economic recession.

Despite this, the organisation gained support among many Labour and Conservative politicians who agreed with his corporatist economic policy, and among these were Aneurin Bevan and Harold Macmillan.

First that gripping audience is arrested,[n 2] then stirred and finally, as we have said, swept off its feet by a tornado of peroration yelled at the defiant high pitch of a tremendous voice.

In October 1937 in Liverpool, he was knocked unconscious by two stones thrown by crowd members after he delivered a fascist salute to 8,000 people from the top of a van in Walton.

[53] As the European situation moved towards war, the BUF began to nominate parliamentary by-election candidates and launched campaigns on the theme of "Mind Britain's Business".

After the outbreak of war, Mosley led the campaign for a negotiated peace, but after the Fall of France and the commencement of aerial bombardment during the Battle of Britain overall public opinion of him became hostile.

Beginning in 1934, they were increasingly worried that Mosley's noted oratory skills would convince the public to provide financial support to the BUF, enabling it to challenge the political establishment.

Mosley, who at that time was focused on pleading for the British to accept Hitler's peace offer of October 1939, was detained on 23 May 1940, less than a fortnight after Winston Churchill became prime minister.

Most other active fascists in Britain met the same fate, resulting in the BUF's practical removal at an organised level from the United Kingdom's political stage.

He refused visits from most BUF members, but on 18 March 1943, Dudley and Norah Elam (who had been released by then) accompanied Unity Mitford to see her sister Diana.

He had connections with the Italian neo-fascist political party, Movimento Sociale Italiano, and contributed to a weekly Roman magazine, Asso di bastoni (Ace of Clubs, published from 1948 to 1957), which was supported by his Europe a Nation.

[9] In the wake of the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, Mosley briefly returned to Britain to stand in the 1959 general election at Kensington North.

He led his campaign stridently on an anti-immigration platform, calling for forced repatriation of Caribbean immigrants as well as a prohibition upon mixed marriages.

Henry Williamson, the agricultural writer and ruralist, put the theories of "blood and soil" into practice, which, in effect, acted as a demonstration farm for Mosley's ideas for the BUF.

Throughout the book, Williamson makes references to regular meetings he had held with his "Leader" (Mosley) and a group of like-minded agrarian thinkers.

[82] Immediately following his release in 1943, Mosley lived with his second wife, Diana, at Crux Easton, Hampshire In 1945, he moved to Crowood Farm, located near Marlborough, Wiltshire, which he ran.