Mosley and British Politics 1918–32

‘Oswald’s Odyssey’ contextualises the long and adventurous political journey of Oswald Mosley from Coalition Conservative in 1918 to informal Asquithian Liberal in 1920, from Independent MP in 1922 to Labour MP in 1924, and from his forming of the New Party in 1931 to his leading of the British Union of Fascists from 1932. In no sense is this book a narrow biographical study of the making of Britain’s answer to Mussolini and Hitler. As the author, David Howell, argues, his account of Mosley ‘offers a distinctive but illuminating route’ through the complexities of British politics between 1918 and 1932. Building on his pioneering work on Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party, Howell pays particular attention to context and the interplay of rival political identities both inside and outside Britain’s principal political parties to plot Mosley’s course. Only a historian with such a breadth and depth of learning about British politics in the early twentieth century could supply this level of nuanced, contextualised discussion of both the reach and limits of Mosley’s influence inside the Labour movement and beyond. The result is a carefully crafted and rigorous analysis of Mosley’s political position as it developed, but also a thought-provoking discussion of the various political options that were open to him (or not open to him) at important junctures

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