The Marketing of Megalomania: Celebrity,Consumption and the Development of Political Technology in the British Union of Fascists

This article offers a reassessment of British fascist politics during the 1930s by shifting the empirical focus away from area studies and investigations of policy and ideology to the reading of the movement’s visual culture, its relations with the media, and its development of a distinctive material culture and innovative political technologies. It seeks to place the BUF within its own national and metropolitan context by adopting an approach informed by cultural history to extremist politics in the 1930s. Critical discourses about British fascism appropriated the language of popular culture to describe and understand the phenomenon of the BUF. The movement was clearly not to be understood only as the next phase in the history of party formation, and thus the language of high politics was either inappropriate or insufficient to conceptualize the movement. Instead, the BUF seemed to represent a merger between a politics of provocation and the new lexicon of cinema and celebrity, a protean movement that blurred the lines between high politics and popular culture. Mosley was described as a dog track promoter, a pantomime character and a swash-buckling movie star. His meetings rivalled the cinema, and his followers were figured as ‘fans’. This examination of the BUF’s cultural production and cultural responses to the movement invites us to problematize the easy dichotomy between left-wing modernism and extreme-right anti-modernism, and to ponder whether the BUF represented political innovation despite political failure.