Well, Jonah, if you’re determined to get a little Mosleyite S&M action going here, let me say that that reference Mark H. made to The Code Of The Woosters gets to the heart of the whole business. P G Wodehouse turned Oswald Mosley into Sir Roderick Spode, founder of the Saviours of Britain, a movement modeled on Hitler’s blackshirts and Mussolini’s brownshirts and hampered only slightly by the fact that all the good shirt colors have been taken and they’re obliged to go around as the Black Shorts. “Footer bags, you mean?” gasps a horrified Bertie Wooster. Yet Bertie has the measure of the would-be dictator:

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting, ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?’

Exactly. Re: Fascism, the difference between Continental Europe and Britain is that the latter could never stop giggling long enough to be seduced by it. Diana Mosley – the Mitford sister I knew best – was a funny and delightful person with one lifelong blind spot: she couldn’t understand that the British recoiled from her husband not because he was the smack of firm leadership they were desperately in need of but because he was a preposterous joke. When I wrote about Diana in The Atlantic (not available online, but it’s in an anthology of mine), I said:

In the late Seventies, Mosley still expected the people to realize their error and belatedly turn to him. “I am ready to serve,” he’d say, gravely, as interviewers tried to keep a straight face. He and Diana spent decades in exile in Paris in a grand house in miniature absurdly called le Temple de la Gloire – the Temple of Glory or, as her more malicious friends dubbed it, the Concentration of Camp. It’s a heartless joke, characteristic of the English upper class. But it’s the jokes that explain the difference between Britain and the Continent: unlike their European counterparts, the English elite could never take Fascism seriously enough to fall for it.
I had the misfortune to meet some of the Mosleys’ shrunken band of followers. Bitter little Cockneys, to whom all Jews were “Yids” and all blacks were “wogs”. But, in a sense, their awfulness confirmed Diana’s certainties about her husband. The people were too crude and stupid: they needed great men to tell them what to do. That was also why, for the last half of her long life, she was a passionate supporter of the European Union – the latest of the elite’s grand plans for the people after the failures of all the others.

As to being whipped by Third Reich dominatrices, one could argue that transforming Nazism into a sex fetish for dress-up perverts is also a very British reductio.