NM: But that whole thing is the history of what was going on in the world at the time he became the junior Minister for Employment in 1929.

RC: He wasn't in Cabinet. That was the important thing, that's why he went through MacDonald instead of Thomas.

NM: And so when he was asked by the Prime Minister to produce his own memorandum about how to solve the unemployment problem, he did this with enormous care, and his argument was that they scarcely read it because it scared them. I expect it did scare them, all that Keynesian stuff, huge public spending, and it was turned down. He sent it out to the party, then at the party conference he very nearly won the vote. The reason why he didn't then carry on and try again at the next party conference was because by this time it was 1931, and people like him genuinely thought, and had reason to think, that this was the end of the capitalist world — there were six million unemployed in Germany, eight million in America — and the reason my father didn't hang on in Labour is that he thought there was no point at all, the whole thing was nearly over. At that time, no one had heard of Hitler.

What my father did was go and visit Mussolini in 1932, and for obvious reasons he was very impressed with the Duce, not because he made the trains run on time, because apparently Mussolini didn't. But this chap said, "I'm going to solve all the problems of the world," and my father felt he was going to do so. And he didn't feel he could do that if he stayed in either the Labour or the Conservative Party, so he said the only way I'm going to solve the problems of the world — because capitalism was out, communism was the only alternative, but for whatever reasons he would say he didn't like communism — and so he thought the only thing is I must start my own party. I don't think when he did so, he thought it was going to turn into fascism, but then he went to see Mussolini.

RC: In his constituency he got 1,000 votes — minuscule, but after that he could never be a parliamentary figure.

NM: But people kept on writing to him, saying all you've got to do is lie low for two years. Admittedly when I say "people", they were people like Bob Boothby, who was a frightful crook. I remember a letter from Boothby saying, "For God's sake Tom [Mosley's nickname], just do nothing, you can come back into Labour or the Conservatives, you can even join the Liberals if you want, they're all longing for you." But by that time it was the last thing he wanted to do. When I say he wasn't a serious politician, a lot of people said that he could have become a Labour or a Tory PM if he'd hung on, but he didn't think that was worth doing, because he thought that in normal party politics you couldn't ever get anything done, it was always blocked, you put something through and then you went through the mill of parliament and then it was blocked. The only thing to do is if you stood up on a soap box and got the public behind you.

So he thought Mussolini was OK, but he hadn't thought of Hitler when he started the British Union of Fascists in 1932. Of course, Hitler didn't come to power till January 1933. Until the end of that year, Hitler wasn't considered very much, he was just someone put in power by the Hindenburg people, he was a figurehead. Then, by the end of '33, my father found that he was on some bandwagon that he couldn't get off. Where could he go? You can't imagine my father just lying low for three years, it didn't make any sense, so he went plunging on.

RC: It's extraordinary. Why didn't he see that he had a real chance of becoming a Labour Prime Minister?

NM: That's why I say he wasn't a serious politician — he couldn't have been.