RC: He was a serious politician, but he made a series of catastrophic mistakes.

NM: Yes, but they were such obvious mistakes. I think power bored him.

RC: Oh, come on!

NM: When he was running the fascists, he had complete power. And it was supposed to be this tight-knit organisation where he gave the orders and everyone jumped to it — he loved having power. But he was a hopeless leader. He always used to say: "Of course I didn't go in for all this anti-Semitism, but of course all my followers were appalling anti-Semites." He never stopped them. He never tried to, he never wanted to. And then finally, people like William Joyce and John Beckett resigned from the fascist party in 1936 because my father was such a hopeless leader. He was never there. He was always either chasing some woman, taking them out to the theatre, or he was shooting or fishing. Or he was standing on top of a van making a terrific speech and then he would get back in his car and he went off. He was hardly ever in the office. He wasn't an office politician. He hated the office, and — what is a politician's life? I don't know. I suppose Mussolini probably hardly ever went into his office.

RC: He obviously thought capitalism was going to collapse, and it didn't, of course. He bet that the whole capitalist and parliamentary system would come to an end, and it was a fatal misjudgment.

NM: Yes, that's absolutely true. That was a total misjudgment. But then an awful lot of people did. That was a time when a lot of serious young men in politics became communists.

RC: The problem for me is: why didn't Mosley recognise that he had a great following in Labour? 

NM: Well, that is the question. I can't think what the answer could be, other than that he didn't want power on those terms. He didn't want power on the terms of having to come and justify himself to the Cabinet, to the Labour Party, to the party conference. He wanted to be a one-man band. 

RC: Absolutely, I quite agree. He rejected parliamentary politics. He said it was a talking shop, not capable of action.

NM: He wasn't a democratic politician, there's no doubt about that. He used to say, "What's the point of parliament? You have 300 people on one side who are trying to get something done, and you have 350 on the other side trying to stop doing it." When I was old enough to say these sorts of things, I would say, "But that's the whole bloody point!" All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. The point of democracy is it stops things getting done. He couldn't understand that. He said, "But that's appalling, I want to get things done." So the only way you can try and get things done is you can go and stand on top of a barrel. But fascism and demagoguery only worked in the days when there was radio and there wasn't television, because demagoguery doesn't work on the telly. When one sees clips of my father now, there are half a dozen clips of him standing up in his black shirt screaming and yelling, and he really does seem a complete loony, although very powerful, quite a scary person. But people didn't think he was a loony in those days, they didn't think Hitler was a loony, hundreds of thousands of people were mesmerised by this carry-on. My father didn't have the chance to get on the radio much. Hitler had loudspeakers on the street corners, but my father filled the Royal Albert Hall, he filled Earl's Court, he filled Speakers' Corner, but this was 3,000 people. He got them standing on their seats, saying "Hooray!" but then when they drifted away, that was it.

This happened even after the war, when he went to Notting Hill on the anti-black racket. He got enormous crowds, people cheering, and he really thought he was going to get into parliament then, as an independent, and he lost his deposit, again. People were mesmerised by him, by his oratory, which was extraordinary. I remember being taken to his Earl's Court meeting in 1939, which was acceptable because he wasn't doing his anti-Semitic drag then, it was "Stop the war, there must not be a second world war". This was April 1939, he got the whole crowd with him saying, "My friends, how many Polish lives are worth one British soldier's?" Everyone thought he was wonderful then, but it didn't make any difference.