The less palatable side of a country's history is always difficult to deal with, and a four-part drama series on the life of Sir Oswald Mosley starting next week, has been branded as glamorising the great dictator England never had.
Apart from the name, which still effects a shudder, Mosley the man has been pretty much brushed under the carpet till now. There are some - including a vociferous Jewish lobby - who think it should stay that way and attacked the series before it was even written. The charge, taken up in a recent interview in the Daily Mail with Mosley's son Nicholas (the series is based on his two-volume biography of his father written in the early 1980s) is that the series is "about to whitewash the most dangerous man to strut our political stage".
Curiously it was the right-wing Daily Mail, and its proprietor Lord Rothermere, who were Mosley's most vociferous supporters in the 1930s. "Guilty Conscience" say Lawrence Marks and Maurice Gran, co-writers of the series who have been working on the project since the late 1980s.
As Marks and Gran and the producer Irving Teitelbaum, not to mention Michael Grade who commissioned the series, are all Jewish, it is unlikely that the most notorious anti-semite England has ever thrown up would be given the wronged-man treatment. What the series does, however, is show Mosley in the context of his class and his period.
At first glance the writers of Birds Of A Feather seem an odd choice for such a project, until you remember that Marks and Gran also gave us The New Statesman.
And the project is theirs. It took them years to get Mosley's son Nicholas to agree to give them the television rights for the two-volume biography of his father on which the series is based. Politics have always fascinated them both.
"Growing up in north London Jewish households, we often heard the name of Mosley reviled and condemned. When, as adults, we realised he was once considered a potential Labour prime minister, we were, to say the least curious. We wondered why the man had almost been airbrushed from the pages of political history?"
British fascists never won a seat in parliament, yet in the 1930s Mosley and his Blackshirt bully boys were a by-word for urban terror in London's East End. Then it was Jews; today Bangladeshis are the victims of the skinheads that are this generation's manifestation of the fascist right. The difference was that Mosley's Blackshirts were not the social pariahs of today's Neo Nazis: Mosley had plenty of adherents from within the Establishment. "We realised, even today," says Marks, "that it still suits many powerful people that Mosley should be perceived as a maverick madman rather than as a fully fledged member of the English ruling class."
The proto-dictator didn't spring from nowhere. Mosely was a career politician, a Tory MP at the age of 22. He was an ego-driven opportunist, and like that other great opportunist Winston Churchill, he crossed the floor of the house.
The occasion was the Conservative/Liberal coalition government's tacit approval of the Black and Tans reprisals in northern Ireland. Mosley was an unusual man, as were the causes he espoused: the IRA and female suffrage. He embraced socialism as wholeheartedly as his money would allow (the Mosley's were old English aristocracy). His wife Lady Cynthia Asquith, daughter of the then foreign secretary, became a Labour MP in her own right.
What the series shows is that had the cards fallen just a little differently, Sir Oswald Mosley could have succeeded Ramsay MacDonald (under whom he had ministerial office) as leader of the Labour Party. His Keynesian view of economics elicited the interest of, among other, Aneurin Bevin. Only when his ambitions were thwarted in the Labour Party did he cross the political Rubicon by founding the British Union of Fascists.
At a time when the priapic dalliances of the US President and the British Foreign Secretary dominate the headlines, Channel 4's Mosley is a timely reminder that political philandering is nothing new. His name is a constant reminder to the British that they could be prey to the rhetoric of a charismatic orator as easily the Germans or Italians.
The series' critics would have us believe that depicting Mosley as a predatory womaniser gives him a glamour he does not deserve. And it must be admitted that, as Mosley, Jonathan Cake does indeed ooze a chiselled sexually-charged charm.
Yet in a strange way his sexual appeal is an apt metaphor for his political appeal, something far more difficult to understand from the politically correct vantage point of the late 1990s. Women would do anything for him. His wife Cimmie - mother of Nicholas Mosley - never gave up on him, even when she was dying and Mosley was living half the week with Diana Guinness, nee Mitford (one of the Mitford sisters, another, Unity was Hitler's mistress). Still alive and living in Paris, Lady Diana (who became Mosley's second wife) will not allow the memory of her husband to be slurred. She and her stepson Nicholas have not spoken since the 1980s when he wrote his biography which she described as "the degraded work of a very little man" and she has refused to have anything to do with the series.
Her stepson, however, feels that his decision to allow Lawrence Marks and Maurice Gran to adapt the books for television has been fully vindicated. Certainly in the series Cimmie (Gemma Redgrave) is portrayed as a heroine and Lady Diana (Emma Davies) a hard-nosed bitch. He feels that, had his mother lived (she died in 1933 when Nicholas was nine) she would have persuaded his father "not to have become involved with the causes which brought him down".
Now a successful novelist (Hopeful Monsters published in 1990 won the Whitbread Book of the Year), one suspects that Nicholas Mosley has spent his life trying to come to terms with his name. Yet he still claims to love his father, still infected by the charm and charisma of a man who seduced woman after woman and a higher percentage of the population than England would like to admit.
Mosley starts on Channel 4, next Thursday at 9 p.m.