Sir Oswald Mosley was elected as a Conservative MP in 1918, but left the Party and sat as an independent throughout 1922 and 1923 before joining the Labour Party in March 1924. Disillusioned with the Labour Party and its abilities to cope with the economic crisis by the end of 1930, he left to set up the New Party, which contested the 1931 general election. The following year, following a fact-finding visit to Italy in January 1932, Mosley replaced the New Party with the British Union of Fascists. Its heyday was 1934, when it received favourable publicity courtesy of Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail (which proclaimed "Hurrah for the Blackshirts!" in January 1934), and received secret funding from Mussolini. BUF membership reached 50,000 by August 1934. But following the violence during the Olympia Rally in June 1934 and Rothermere’s withdrawal of funding, numbers dropped off; by October 1935 BUF membership had fallen to 5,000. |
