"You can change the world"

Jeremy Paxman writes affectionately in The Guardian of his partner's aunt, a lady of undiminished vigour in her 94th year:

It's important, too, Eileen thinks, to take pride in your appearance. She recalls catching her 90-year-old mother looking at herself in the mirror as she was dressing to go out. "Her gestures were those of a young girl preening herself ... I, too, look in the mirror." She joyfully destroys photographs that make her look too ancient.

But, above all, I think, it is a sense of engagement that has kept her so full of vigour.

Maybe it was the Baptist background that made her susceptible to the redemptorist promises of the British Union of Fascists, which she joined after being introduced to Sir Oswald Mosley's New Party. "Giovanni Gentile and Alfred Rosenberg gave me a sense of how life works. I loved the stress on race and nation: it was like a Wagner opera. And it gave the individual a belief that they could change the world. Above all, it was optimistic."

In the event, although born eight years before the March on Rome, she has comfortably outlived the unhappy experience of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Yet, almost to the end, she stayed loyal to the BUF and its successor, the Union Movement. How could she have remained in the party after the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws, let alone the Anschluss and the Munich agreement?

At the time she was living in Canada, where the far-Right National Union Party was illegal. The isolation of a life in which almost all friends were party members played a part, as, doubtless, did naivety. Those who left the party then, she felt, were indulging in egotism.

All right, I've slightly amended this account, as you will see from the link. It was not fascism that Paxman's partner's aunt gave allegiance to, but Communism. It was not the ideologists Gentile and Rosenberg who turned her head, but Marx and Lenin. It was not the Munich betrayal that might have caused her to reassess her political allegiance, but the invasion of Hungary. Doubtless some of my readers will see a substantial moral difference between the reality and the thought experiment; I don't. There were plenty of Communists and fellow travellers in the 1930s who were disabused of their illusions by the Moscow Trials, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the coup in Czechoslovakia and so on and on. They said so, and turned to democratic politics. Denis Healey and (though never a party member) Sidney Hook are among those I have mentioned favourably many times on this site; they recognised the reality of Communism, abandoned the movement and worked to defeat it with a democratic variant of left-wing politics.

With a lady who maintained membership of the Communist Party through 1956 and - so I infer from Paxman's phrasing - almost to the collapse of the Soviet Union, you're faced with a different political phenomenon. The Communist Party of Great Britain supported the invasion of Hungary. The Party's General Secretary, John Gollan, stated (quoted in Keith Laybourn and Dylan Murphy, Under the Red Flag: A History of Communism in Britain, 1999, p. 149): "There is the greatest danger that reaction can obtain victory in Hungary" (as it did, of course, but that's not what he meant).

Doubtless Mrs Eileen Daffern, aunt of the partner of Jeremy Paxman, has many personal qualities, and family love (even vicariously through one's spouse or partner) is unconditional. But admiration - not love, or sympathy - is something else. Most of Mrs Daffern's life has been devoted to the cause of totalitarianism. She is a woman of scant imagination at best, and if she were in my family I wouldn't be shouting about it.