Mosley - The Complete Series

This four-part TV series - first aired in '98 – stars Jonathan Cake in the role of British fascist and notorious womanizer Oswald Mosley and charts his life in the period between the First World War and WW2.

It’s 1918 and back then our ambitious anti-hero was a mere young army officer by the name of Oswald ‘Tom’ Mosley. Deciding to run for government office, he manipulates influential friends such as American actress and businesswoman Maxine Elliott (Deborah Weston) and young Conservative Bob Boothby (Hugh Bonneville). In no time he finds himself introduced to the Prime Minister David Lloyd George (Windsor Davies) and soon is elected as one of the youngest Parliamentary members ever. Highly ambitious and always out for improving his chances, Mosley leaves no stone unturned to seduce Cynthia ‘Cimmie’ Curzon (Jemma Redgrave), the second daughter of Lord Curzon (Robert Langdon Lloyd). Initially wary of Mosley’s charms, Cimmie eventually gives in - something she will soon come to regret! Despite his promises of eternal love, he still finds time to seduce Cimmie’s step-mother along the way!

It’s now 1924 and thanks to his aristocratic background (he never attended university) Mosley is a man brimming with confidence. Not only does he finally get Cimmie for his wife, but gets elected as a Conservative MP. He even has friend Cecil Beaton (Orlando Wells) to snap the wedding portraits. Despite another affair with Jane Bewley (Caroline Langrishe), the wife of a Tory MP, Mosley eventually makes a left-turn and steers towards the Labour Party. Despite initial opposition by the Party, he soon wins a front bench seat with Labour – much to the delight of his ever-loyal Cimmie. One can’t help wondering whether it was an in-joke to cast Gemma Redgrave as his crusading left wing wife? After all, the Redgrave clan is well known for their left-wing political activities.

The tail end of the 1920’s is nigh and both Mosley and Cimmie run for seats with the Labour Party – their political stance seems at times the only thing that still holds the marriage together, seeing how Mosley’s philandering goes on and on. A political setback to do with the unemployment problem prompts Mosley to form his own New Party while cultivating an involvement with Diana Mitford Guinness (Emma Davies). By now, Mosley’s marriage with Cimmie is only held together for the sake of the children and she gets more and more disillusioned not only with his constant affairs but also with finds herself at odds with the politics of her husband’s New Party. This also goes for some of his old comrades, including Boothby. Following Mussolini’s (Stephen Gressieux) rise to power, Mosley once again smells his next opportunity and his party turns fascist, with him and party members dressed in uniforms, hence the Blackshirts.

The year is 1933 and Cimmie is on her deathbed with a distressed and guilt-ridden Mosley by her side. The doctor warns Mosley that his wife simply has lost the will to fight for her life and she dies of peritonitis a few days later. Although mourning the death of Cimmie (and one must ask as to why he ever married her in the first place) Mosley’s political ambition has no end. Now it’s Mussolini who supports him financially – it means that Mosley can now establish the British Union of Fascists, complete with ‘stewards’ who beat up opposing hecklers at political rallies. Diana Guinness cultivates relations with the likes of Dr. Joseph Goebbels (Erich Redmann) in Germany, while in France Mosley begins a romantic involvement with Cimmie’s sister Alexandra (Flora Montgomery). The relationship, however, is short-lived and on a visit to Germany, Mosley finally marries Diana in the company of Goebbels and Hitler (Reinhardt Michaels), who sneers (in German) at Mosley for having abandoned a Fascist Union march back in London upon the advise of police forces. Despite a chilling resemblance to Nazi Party speeches, Mosley was initially neutral to the ‘Jewish problem’ – however, this gradually changed and his politics became highly anti-semitic despite his life-long denial of this, culminating in the 1936 ‘Battle of Cable Street’ where the people of East London forced back a march by Mosley and his fascist Blackshirts through the East End (the very event which Hitler used to humiliate his guest Mosley at the German wedding reception). In fact, the Hitler sequence is quite amusing. After all, what would a blue blooded Englishman have in common with a little working class oik from Austria called Schicklgruber?
The series ends with a shift in politics following WW2 and Mosley’s consequent imprisonment. Mosely always claimed his sole intention (these days he would have been a leading member of UKIP) was to stop a war with Germany - a war the English Jews had wanted since the early Thirties (well, according to him) and we can see why.

Jonathan Cake (now what exactly happened to him?) does a terrific job of bringing this much-hated man (is there anyone who would say misunderstood?) to the screen and is almost as tall as the man in question. The support cast is equally impressive, in particular Jemma Redgrave as Mosley’s long-suffering wife ‘Cimmie’. Popular writing team Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran have done a fair job in bringing the sordid saga to life and the whole production looks a lavish treat.
This is an object lesson in history for the uninitiated. God knows what Mosley would have thought of the current political climate. Needless to say one cannot imagine he would have wanted to pay a visit to Angela Merkel…