NM: Well, his office sent telegrams to and fro. But he didn't meet him. My father only met Hitler twice. I don't think he ever met Streicher. Diana met Streicher lots of times.

RC: Diana was very fond of Streicher. Except she said he was a rather second-rate man.

NM: But that was very Mitford-like. If you asked a Mitford if they had ever met some famous murderer, Heath or Haig or someone, they would answer, "Oh yes he was simply sweet." 

RC: These Mitfordian utterances were confined to friends in private. I think you are in danger of trivialising Diana and the significance of her close friendship with Hitler and her public loyalty to Mosley and his political beliefs. 

NM: As you say, my father wasn't an obvious personal anti-Semite. He didn't have a gut feeling, but what he was uselessly, absolutely pathetically responsible for, was not stopping his followers. And this was unforgivable.

RC: But that's what he told me, that's exactly what he told me. By omission, if you like, he became indistinguishable from a racist.

NM: Yes, he became indistinguishable from a Nazi, almost. Because he not only let his followers march through the East End, dressed in black shirts, singing the Horst Wessel Lied, the Nazi anthem, to the English words "We'll fight for Mosley," he also purloined the Mussolini marching song, Giovinezza. So if you have your followers in their black shirts marching through the streets of the East End shouting anti-Jewish slogans, singing the Nazi anthem, and you think you're not an anti-Semite, you're mad. 

When he went back into politics after the war, up to Notting Hill on the anti-black thing, rather than having an argument that he just brushed away, I thought I'd rather have a personal conversation with him. So I went over and said, "Dad, you're doing the same thing. You're putting everyone against you like you did before the war, and this is not only wrong, it's insane! You're a lunatic!" And I believe that, I think there was a sort of lunacy in him about that. He couldn't see two and two and put it together and make four. You can't pin the plot down, as you say, because it doesn't make sense. He wasn't what one normally calls a straightforward anti-Semite and yet he was absolutely set up as an anti-Semitic icon. And he allowed it. And why would he do that? That's what puzzled me. 

I think he saw a global thing. After the war, when I was still very much in contact with him, he suddenly became a passionate pro-apartheid supporter in South Africa. They were the last arguments I had face-to-face with him. There was a very right-wing man out in South Africa who was even more to the right of Botha, and he was a great ally to my father. And my father just believed he was a racialist in that he thought it would make sense: that races weren't supposed to mix, that it just didn't work: it was like mixing vinegar and oil or whatever. And therefore it was much better if the blacks went back to the West Indies. Therefore, his policy was to pour money into the West Indies, make jobs so that the blacks would go back. And I said, "But they won't go back," and he couldn't understand this. I think that the one nice story about my father's show of racism is, when he was quite old, I was chatting to him and I just happened to use the phrase, "Oh well, she's a very beautiful black woman." And my father said "What do you mean, a beautiful black woman?" He couldn't comprehend how a black person could be called beautiful. That was completely daft.