From the archive, 21 October 1968: Oswald Mosley, the bison in waiting

The way things are shaping, Orsay could soon be a place of pilgrimage. For 17 years Sir Oswald Mosley has been in a kind of retreat here, where the electricity pylons from Paris go striding across the market gardens of Villebon and Orsay. He has patiently waited until we should recognise him for what he has always known himself to be - part soldier, part politician, and all visionary. He has written his autobiography, which is going to clear the old bogy that he wanted to be a dictator; and with it he is himself prepared to bury the hatchet after the years of hatred and abuse. This morning he is a man quietly ready for acclaim.

It has already begun. Sir Oswald Mosley is the only living Englishman who could perfectly well have been either Conservative or Labour Prime Minister: we have Mr Muggeridge’s word for that. He might have been a very great Prime Minister, according to Lord Boothby. He was the outstanding politician of his generation … spurned by Whitehall, Fleet Street, and every party leader at Westminster simply and solely because he was right: that is Mr Crossman speaking. And Sir Hugh Carleton Greene’s organisation is spending much valuable time on him tonight, though it is a very few years since Sir Hugh said that Sir Oswald would appear on BBC television only over his dead body.

A man was meant to come into his own in this house with its Classical front, its landscaped lawns and its lake set among trees. Napoleon built it for General Moreau as a present after Hohenlinden and called it Le Temple de la Gloire. Sir Oswald grins at that one; but he bears it easily. He has logs spitting in his fireplace, an Irish retainer for a chauffeur, and, facing him across his dining-room table, a bust of Chatham to remind him how glory is sometimes delayed. He does not fail to remark that Pitt was excluded from affairs until a crisis befell the nation.

He plays the host magnificently. He is attentive, considerate, and infinitely courteous. He wonders twice whether Mr Lehane, the chauffeur, managed to obtain food during a long wait at the airport. When a telephone call from London interrupts conversation he does not ask to be excused: he says “Forgive me.” You would have to be quite frantically hostile not to be charmed off your chair by Sir Oswald Mosley in private.

He talks like a statesman who may be in the wilderness but who knows he is not finished yet. The heavy bison head, with the blotches of age staining its cheeks, is held motionless, looking straight to the front. That husky voice - a bit like Macmillan’s - is not really answering questions. It is reciting policies which have been worked out and refined beyond all shadow of doubt and which are presented with all the caste marks of reason. It is utterly persuasive. But there is an unsettling way of flashing the eyes in aside to emphasise a point; the lids flick back without the brows shifting at all. In its time this trick, or birthright, must have mesmerised thousands.

The past, it seems, is a thing that is over and done with. Sir Oswald has only one regret about his Fascist years and that is putting his men into a paramilitary uniform, which frightened people who thought he had something to do with Hitler, though Sir Oswald can see why; they were hysterical at happenings on the Continent. There is, though, a residue from the past that ought to be cleared. Sir Oswald believes in consensus government, with people from the parties, the universities, public life, and the Army. The two parties are only a couple of moneybags with two or three hundred paid agents and they can’t prevail for ever. But then he remembers that in the rank and file of the parties are some of the earth’s salt. For Sir Oswald would go to the stake for Britain and her people.

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