The following letter was published in The New Statesman on 22 November. Lord Northcliiffe was the greatest press baron of his time, but cannot be censured for supporting fascism. It got substantial press backing from elsewhere.
Alison Phillips (The Critics, 8 November) states that “Northcliffe supported Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and the Nazis”. That would have been difficult since Northcliffe died in 1922 when Mosley was a mildly left-wing MP.
The guilty man was Lord Rothermere, owner of the rabid Daily Mail. He became briefly enamoured of the Blackshirts in 1934, praising their “sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine” (he was a rather dim man). Within seven months he fell out with Mosley, tearing up their joint plans to set up a cigaratte-manufacturing company.
He worshipped Hitler for years. One historian of the period has described him as “perhaps the most influential single protagonist for fascism between the wars.”
Alistair Lexden, House of Lords
