He wasn't a racial anti-Semite, he was an old-fashioned conservative. Diana was completely anti-Semitic and confessed it in her interview under 18B [the internment regulation]. I never got hold of his interview under 18B, I have only got Diana's where she openly confessed, "I am a friend of Hitler." She become one via [her sister] Unity. She chased round the cafés in Munich trying to meet Hitler. Finally, she met him. Diana became a very close friend of Hitler, you must admit that.

NM: Of Hitler, yes indeed.

RC: No doubt about that. But when I brought up this racist thing, he said, "You know well it's not me, it's my followers who are anti-Semites." Well then, why didn't he stop his followers from being anti-Semites? He capitalised on it. 

NM: That's what I mean about him — he was a hopeless leader, a hopeless politician. 

RC: I don't think he was a hopeless politician.

NM: He was a hopeless democratic politician. He hated party politics and he couldn't even run his own party. He couldn't tell his followers what to do. They were marching through the streets chanting: "The Yids, the Yids, we've got to get rid of the Yids!" My father thought this was a perfectly absurd thing to do and he didn't tell them to stop. This isn't a serious politician.

RC: When do you think he made his first anti-Semitic speech?

NM: I tried to pin this down when I was writing my books about him, and it was one of his Albert Hall speeches, I think it was at the end of 1934 or early 1935, and the story as far as I could make it out that is in The Greater Britain, which he wrote in the autumn of '31, there isn't one word about the Jews. Absolutely nothing at all: anti-Semitism didn't exist. Then the fascist party got under way by '32. And when he started off his fascist movement he did get money from Mussolini through Ciano [Mussolini's son-in-law and, at that time, propaganda minister].

RC: But he always lied about that.

NM: He always lied about it up until the very last moment.

RC: I broke with your father over anti-Semitism. At dinner with Diana on the day the violent Nazi anti-Semite Julius Streicher was executed, she asked her guests to observe a moment's silence in his memory. I realised I was in the wrong box and suspended all contact with Diana, and only saw Oswald again a few months before he died.

NM: But he never met Streicher, Raymond!

RC: But he corresponded with him.