Novelist who escaped the dark shadow of his fascist father

Nicholas Mosley 1923-2017

Nicholas Mosley, who has died aged 93, was a well-regarded novelist – the author of some 25 books – and the eldest son of the fascist leader Oswald Mosley. A stuttering, liberal intellectual, he had little in common with his “buccaneering” parent and, indeed, they fell out so badly at one point that they didn’t speak for years, said The Daily Telegraph. Yet when Mosley Snr was close to death, in 1980, and looking for an official biographer, it was to Nicholas that he turned. The resulting volumes were praised for their honesty and insight.

Nicholas Mosley was born in London in 1923, the son of Oswald Mosley and his first wife, Cynthia (Cimmie), the daughter of Lord Curzon. Both his parents were Labour MPS, and – even by the standards of the day – had little to do with him when he was growing up. By the age of seven, he had developed a severe stammer – a reaction, he thought, to the verbal aggression in his family. He was taken to Lionel Logue, the speech therapist who treated George VI, but he was not cured. His mother died of peritonitis when he was nine, a year after Mosley had formed the British Union of Fascists. After that, her sisters took care of him; one of them, Baba Metcalfe (“Baba Blackshirt”) also took care of his father, becoming one of his mistresses. In 1936, Oswald secretly married Diana Guinness (née Mitford) at Joseph Goebbels’ house. At prep school, Nicholas was teasingly referred to as “Baby Blackshirt”; but by the time his father and stepmother were interned in 1940, he was safely at Eton, where he was relieved to find that no one “turned a hair”. On leaving school, he joined the Rifle Brigade: “I knew after that there would have been no point people asking me if I was for or against Hitler,” he explained. In 1944, he was awarded the MC. He then went up to Balliol College, Oxford, only to drop out after a year. The beneficiary of a large family trust, he had no need to work. Instead, he bought a smallholding in Wales, with the first of his two wives, and began to write. His early novels were, he conceded, “romantic and overwritten”. Later works were more experimental and highbrow, with themes including the possibility of making

good from evil. Accident (1965) was turned into a successful film; and Hopeful Monsters won the Whitbread Award in 1990.

In the late 1950s, he was horrified when his father returned to the political fray. “I faced him and said, ‘You’re not only being immoral, wicked and crazy, but self-destructive.’” The pair were estranged, and Oswald cut him out of his will. Yet he left him his archive, from which Nicholas produced a two-volume biography, depicting his father as a womaniser and an egotist addicted to his own rhetoric. Diana Mosley denounced him as a “second-rate son hating a brilliant father”, and never spoke to him again.