The Year the Daily Mail Campaigned for Britain's Blackshirts

September 13, 2026

Illustration of a 1930s newspaper proprietor's desk with a paper whose headline is smudged out, a cheque book, a pen and a packet of cigarettes, labelled January 1934

In January 1934, the Daily Mail ran a full page editorial urging its readers to support the British Union of Fascists. The headline was "Hurrah for the Blackshirts". It was not a stray column by a hired contrarian, or a letter or a piece of reader's correspondence the subs had waved through. It was written by Lord Rothermere, who owned the paper, and it ran under his name.

This is one of those facts that people assume must have been exaggerated, because it sounds like something invented later by an opponent with a grudge. It was not. It ran, under that headline, in the paper that is still on the shelf in the garage and still, ninety years on, the most read in the country. You can look it up. People do, and then they go quiet for a bit.

I first came across it in a history lesson in Ipswich in the late eighties, delivered by a teacher who clearly enjoyed the reaction, and I remember not believing him. The Daily Mail was the paper my grandparents took. It had a crossword. The idea that it had once campaigned for fascism seemed like the sort of thing you say about a paper, not the sort of thing a paper actually does.

And it gets better, in the way that these things always get better, because the editorial was not the end of Rothermere's involvement. It was the start.

Illustration of a 1930s London newsstand with a newspaper whose headline is smudged out, labelled January 1934 Front Page — Not a leaked memo. The front of the paper, on sale, for money.

What the paper actually said

Rothermere praised Mosley's movement for its "sound, common sense, Conservative doctrine", which is a remarkable phrase to attach to men in uniform who were, at the time, in the business of removing hecklers from meetings by hand and occasionally by the stairs.

He described the Blackshirts as the party of youth and energy. He urged young men to join. The Mail ran supportive coverage through the first half of 1934, including a competition with prizes for readers who wrote in explaining why they liked the fascists.

It printed the case, in other words. Not once, in a moment of madness, but as a position, over months. It gave the movement the one thing money cannot easily buy, which is respectability, delivered daily to the breakfast tables of exactly the people Mosley needed and could not otherwise reach.

You can argue about how much difference a newspaper makes. Historians do. What is not arguable is that the BUF's membership grew during exactly the months the Mail was behind it, that recruitment offices reported a surge, and that Mosley himself understood the endorsement to be worth more than any rally. A rally reaches the converted. The Mail reached the golf club.

Illustration of a 1930s breakfast table with a folded newspaper, teapot, toast rack and boiled egg, labelled Delivered Daily — Delivered daily to exactly the people Mosley could not otherwise reach.

Then he sold them cigarettes

Here is the part that never makes it into the potted version, and it is the part I like best. Rothermere did not stop at the editorial. He put around seventy thousand pounds into a joint cigarette business with the BUF, which in today's money is roughly three million.

A cigarette company. With the fascists. The brand was to be sold through the movement's own network, so that a young man could join the Blackshirts and be sold a packet of twenty by the same organisation in the same week.

Read that again slowly. The owner of Britain's most-read newspaper backed the fascists on the front page and then tried to sell fags with them. There is something almost restful about how unembarrassed the whole thing was. Nobody was hiding. Nobody thought there was anything to hide. It was business, and business was good and the uniforms were a marketing asset.

The venture went nowhere, which is the only part of this story with a happy ending, and it went nowhere for the same reason the rest of it did. Within six months the backer had gone.

Fact box

Rothermere put roughly £70,000 into a joint business venture with the BUF, about £3 million today.

It was a cigarette company, to be sold through the movement's own network. The proprietor of the Daily Mail did not merely endorse Britain's fascist party in print, he went into business with it. The venture collapsed with the endorsement, six months later.

The owner of Britain’s most-read newspaper backed the fascists on the front page and then tried to sell fags with them.

Woman in a black I Think Therefore I Am Not a Daily Mail Reader t-shirt on a high street — A position with ninety years of supporting documentation.
Shirt: Not a Daily Mail Reader · £25.95

And then he stopped

The support did not end because Rothermere had a change of heart about fascism. Nothing in the record suggests he had one. It ended because of a rally at Olympia in June 1934, where BUF stewards beat hecklers in front of an audience that included MPs, journalists and other people who mattered, and the violence became something respectable people had seen rather than something they had heard about.

That distinction is the whole story. The Blackshirts had been violent for two years. Everybody who paid attention knew it. But knowing a thing and having watched it from a good seat are different, and the good seats at Olympia were full of exactly the readers the Mail was selling the movement to.

Advertisers got nervous. Government got nervous. And within weeks Rothermere had written a second letter, this one withdrawing the paper's support, in language that suggested the whole thing had been a misunderstanding about the direction the movement was taking.

Mosley lost his newspaper, and with it the respectability and with that the recruitment. Two years later he tried to march through the East End and got four streets, but the money and the coverage had already gone. Olympia was the night the backer saw it. Cable Street was just the afternoon the neighbours did.

Illustration of a 1930s London exhibition hall at night with a torn rally poster, labelled Olympia June 1934 — Olympia, June 1934. The night the violence got good seats.

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The pattern, which is the point

I am not telling you this because the Daily Mail of 2026 is the Daily Mail of 1934. It is not, and pretending otherwise is the sort of lazy shot that lets everybody off, including the paper. Rothermere has been dead since 1940. The current one is his great-grandson and has never, to my knowledge, gone into the tobacco trade with anybody.

I am telling you because of the shape. A press baron decided a movement was useful, gave it a front page, gave it money, went into business with it and dropped it the moment the violence became visible to people who mattered. Not when the violence started. When it became visible. The calculation was never moral. It was commercial, and it was made twice, once going in and once coming out. Both times the deciding factor was the advertisers.

That shape has not gone anywhere. It is, if anything, the default setting for how a certain kind of newspaper handles a certain kind of movement.

Useful while it sells. Regrettable once it is on camera.

What to do with this

When a newspaper starts describing something ugly as sound common sense, the useful question is not whether it believes it. Belief is cheap and nobody can check it. The useful question is what it has invested, because that is the thing that decides when it stops.

Man in a black Fascism is Cured by Reading t-shirt at a bookstall under a railway arch — Rothermere told two million readers what to think. This is the alternative.
Shirt: Fascism is Cured by Reading · £25.95

And when it does stop, when the tone shifts and the movement it was cheering last month becomes a regrettable episode, the useful thing is to remember the cigarettes. Not the editorial. Everybody remembers the editorial. The cigarettes are the tell, because they show it was never a mistake. It was a deal.