ABSTRACT
After John Beckett’s death the far right continued its unlovely progress, showing a growing tendency to split into ever tinier fragments. Two years after he died, in 1966, Mosley returned to England from his home in France to contest a by-election in Shoreditch, but lost his deposit. John would have loved his explanation – it was exactly the same one that he gave when the BUF was humiliated in east London in 1937: he had done better than Hitler in his first election. Mosley, writes Graham Macklin, “never faltered in his belief that he was a man of destiny, even if it was increasingly obvious to all and sundry that his time had passed”. Robert Skidelsky’s 1975 biography, which seemed uncritically to accept Mosley’s spin on events, provided temporary rehabilitation for the old monster, but Macklin writes that, especially when he had been drinking, his urbane and cultured veneer started to slip, his eyes flared and he was the fascist leader again, screaming hate. He died in 1980, aged 84. In 1967, three years after John died, A.K. Chesterton merged the far right groups to form the National Front, becoming its first chairman. By
then, new racial minorities, immigrants from Africa and Asia, had largely replaced Jews as the necessary fascist enemy. Chesterton seems to have thought the merger would give his rather ridiculous League of Empire Loyalists a working-class base, writing to British National Party leader John Bean: “You also have, what we do not have to any extent, an appeal to the working classes, which seemed to us another good reason for a merger.” The LEL had sufficient respectability to be acceptable on the far right of the Conservative Party, especially as Chesterton had renounced fascism. Going in with the likes of Bean lost him that, and involved him in bitter internecine battles with people half his age. Doris Chesterton thought it was the worst mistake of his life, though I would argue that it has some strong competition. He died in 1973, aged 74, having, like the Bourbons in 1815, learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Chesterton’s new National Front was too moderate for Colin Jordan, who had co-founded the BNP with John Bean. Jordan was elected “world Führer” with American Nazi Lincoln Rockwell as his designated successor, and married Christian Dior’s niece Francoise Dior in a blood-mingling ceremony, using an SS dagger to spill their blood over a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. When he was 82, in 2005, Jordan became a kind of father figure to a new incarnation of John Beckett’s British People’s Party, this time avowedly pro-Nazi. Jordan died in 2009, and his new BPP outlived him by four years. Its Wikipedia entry made me jump: “it was largely dedicated to the legacies of British Nazis who pre-date the party, such as Arnold Leese, John Beckett and Colin Jordan”. Is that the company that the shades of my entertaining, very human Jewish socialist father now keeps? The year that A.K. Chesterton founded the National Front, 1967, the Jesuits closed Beaumont. It had outlived my father by three years. Today almost no one has heard of the Catholic Eton, but a few elderly men still gather every year at the East India and Public Schools Club, without their wives (for women are not admitted), to reminisce about the glory days when they rowed or boxed against Eton, and congratulate each other on the award of papal knighthoods.
