Diana Mosley

Diana, Lady Mosley (née Mitford; 17 June 1910 – 11 August 2003), known as Diana Guinness between 1929 and 1936, was a British fascist, aristocrat, writer and editor. She was married to Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.

Diana was one of the Mitford sisters, six girls born to David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale and his wife Sydney Bowles (1880–1963), namely Nancy (born 1904), Pamela (1907), Diana (1910), Unity (1914), Jessica (1917) and Deborah (1920). The sisters had one brother, Tom (born 1909) who was killed in action in 1945.

She was initially married to Bryan Guinness, heir to the barony of Moyne, and they both became part of a social group of young Bohemian socialites in 1920s London known as the bright young things. Her marriage ended in divorce as she was pursuing a relationship with Oswald Mosley. In 1936, she married Mosley at the home of the propaganda minister for Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler as guest of honour.

Mosley's involvement with Nazi figures and fascist political causes resulted in three years' internment during the Second World War, when Britain was at war with the fascist regime of Nazi Germany. She later moved to Paris and enjoyed some success as a writer. In the 1950s, she contributed diaries to Tatler and edited the fascist magazine The European. In 1977, she published her autobiography, A Life of Contrasts, and in the 1980s she wrote two biographies of leading figures.

Mosley's 1989 appearance on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs caused controversy. Mosley did not quite express Holocaust denial but went as far as to question the extent of Hitler’s involvement, and often stressed in interviews that her own association with Hitler occurred before the Holocaust. She was a regular book reviewer for Books and Bookmen and later at The Evening Standard in the 1990s. Of her beauty, family friend James Lees-Milne wrote "She was the nearest thing to Botticelli's Venus that I have ever seen". She was described by obituary writers such as the historian Andrew Roberts as "unrepentant" about her previous political associations.