The Mosley-Mussolini disclosure, coming as it did just before the
Parliamentary adjournment and the Whitsun holiday, attracted less attention than might have been expected. The question to the Home Secretary was obviously arranged, as such questions commonly are, and when the supplementary, asking what the subsidy of 3,500,000 lire a year in pounds at the 1935 rate came to, was put in, Mr. Ede had the answer—£60,403—ready to hand out to the last digit. Sir Oswald Mosley, of course, denies the whole affair, but his protestation that during the war the authorities had access to all the British Union of Fascists' accounts, and could detect any such transaction if it took place, carries little conviction. The war began in September, 1939 ; Count Grandi's letters to Mussolini dealing with the subventions to Mosley were dated 1934 and 1935 ; no one, moreover, could seriously suppose that traces of a transaction of this kind would be allowed to appear in any accounts. If Mosley and his Fascists were not sufficiently flattened out already, the Mussolini subsidy disclosure would have finished him once for all with the British public. Political subventions from foreign Governments, of whatever colour, are net popular in Great Britain.
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