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His flirtation with Oswald Mosley illustrated both his fundamental benevolence and his capacity for fatuity. Like many others, he admired Mosley’s energy and self-confidence and joined the New Party in the belief that it offered Britain a chance for regeneration which was not to be hoped for from any of the tired and traditional parties of the past. He deplored Mosley’s attitude towards the Jews but still felt a sneaking sympathy for the sentiments that underlay it: ‘Although I loathe anti-Semitism,’ he once admitted, ‘I do dislike Jews.’ But he shrank from the violent side of Mosley’s politics and soon found the party vulgar and slightly ridiculous. When Mosley asked for suggestions for a suitable uniform for his party members, Nicolson characteristically suggested ‘grey-flannel trousers and shirts’. He disengaged himself from the New Party before the going got too hot. Mosley had no political judgment, was his final verdict. ‘He believes in fascism. I don’t. I loathe it.’ But when Mosley was interned in May 1940 Nicolson was one of the few active politicians who risked his career by offering to visit him in prison. Fortunately the overture was rebuffed: Mosley did not like the tone of Nicolson’s patriotic broadcasts on the BBC and refused to receive him.
Nigel Nicolson’s brilliant and alarmingly honest description of the relationship between his parents in Portrait of a Marriage has left little room for a biographer keen to disinter savoury — or unsavoury — new material. Rose is anyway not disposed to undertake any such investigation. His analysis of the bond that linked Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West is sympathetic, dispassionate and wholly non-judgmental. Despite the propensity of both parties to conduct amatory escapades with members of their own sex, one is left in no doubt that they loved and appreciated each other and that each attached enormous importance to their union.
Norman Rose is a distinguished Jewish historian with studies of Vansittart, Weizmann and Winston Churchill to his credit and a profound knowledge of international politics. Though Nicolson himself would have thought these qualifications entirely appropriate, Rose was the wrong person to write this biography. He makes much of his subject’s Foreign Office career and his subsequent pronouncements on foreign policy, but though Nicolson wrote a few cogent memoranda and for a time impressed those in authority over him, his propensity to equivocate, to irritate those on whose goodwill he depended, to ignore the realities of power and energetically to promote worthy but hopelessly unattainable causes, ensured that he would never have got to the top or anywhere near it. What is of interest about Nicolson is his writing, his friends and his curious life-style — and on this Rose is less strong. Typically, he analyses at length Nicolson’s not very significant contribution to the formation of foreign policy during the first world war but says nothing about what it was like to work peacefully in Whitehall while one’s friends and contemporaries were one by one dying on the Western Front. Lees-Milne’s biography of Nicolson, though astute and perceptive, left room for a more detached and considered study. Rose has provided some useful raw material for such a book but has not himself filled the gap.
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