It’s time to stop celebrating the Mitford sisters – they are Downton Abbey with swastikas

All soap operas have their day, and none is more in need of being taken off air, banned from repeats, and wiped from the archives than the wretched, endlessly exhausting saga of the Mitford girls. Just when we thought we might be safe, along comes Outrageous – a new TV drama so star-spangled, so smugly sumptuous, and so determined to rekindle our obsession with this clan of over-privileged eccentrics that it might as well be subtitled Downton Abbey with swastikas.

The release of Outrageous is the latest instalment in what feels like a never-ending cultural necrophilia involving these six women. We have been drowned in their memoirs, letters, biographies, biographies of the letters, filmed adaptations of the memoirs, and of course, screeds of column inches in everything from Country Life to Tatler to the New Statesman.

And now, once again, a drama series arrives to tell us how delightful, how quirky, how extraordinary they all were. Supposedly.

For decades, these reactionary oddballs have been relentlessly mythologised, as though eccentricity alone were a virtue. Diana, the so-called beauty of the bunch, was a cold-hearted fascist who wasn’t merely the consort of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, but an ideological soulmate.

Diana attended Nazi rallies, corresponded with Nazis, and spent the Second World War not in a bunker or exile, but in Holloway Prison – a deservedly ignoble fate. And let’s be clear: she wasn’t interned because she married Mosley. She was locked up because she was dangerous in her own right, with views as extreme as any goose-stepping zealot in Berlin.

Unity Valkyrie Mitford – yes, that really was her name, and yes, she really was conceived in a Canadian town called Swastika – took the fascist infatuation even further. As recent diary extracts revealed in the Daily Mail, Unity’s adolescent ramblings were steeped in obsession with Hitler from the start. The diary’s publication makes for grim reading. Not just because of its reverence for Nazism, but because of the tone: gushing, breathless, completely devoid of self-awareness.

This wasn’t of political interest. It was fanatical, eroticised devotion to a genocidal maniac. She followed Hitler around like a groupie, insinuated herself into his inner circle, and, when war broke out, reacted not with patriotic loyalty but with suicidal despair, resulting in her shooting herself.

The bullet didn’t kill her, but it did silence her, and no longer would she be able to write letters such as these to Nazi newspapers: “We look forward to the day on which we shall declare with full power and might ‘England for the English!’ Jews out! Heil Hitler! Unity Mitford. PS, please print my name in full for everyone should know that I am a Jew hater.”

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Then we have Jessica, the leftie outlier, hailed by many as the family conscience. But while she may have rejected fascism, she embraced the hard left with all the same naive fervour. She and her husband spent some 15 years rising through the ranks of the American Communist Party – thereby showing complicity in a political movement responsible for gulags, show trials, and millions of deaths. In their universe, the Mitfords couldn’t simply flirt with extreme ideology – they embraced it wholeheartedly.

Pamela, of course, did nothing of the sort. Her passions were poultry, and it is a blessed relief to find a Mitford about whom there is almost nothing to say. Her greatest legacy is being described by her sisters as “the rural Mitford”. It is the only kind thing they ever said about each other. Deborah, meanwhile, married into the Devonshire clan, transformed herself into a duchess, and busied herself with stately homes, livestock, and penning an unholy number of letters to Patrick Leigh Fermor. Her published correspondence is recommended only for insomniacs or masochists.

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That leaves Nancy, the writer, the wit, the novelist whose books (most famously The Pursuit of Love) kickstarted this Mitford mythology industry in the first place. Her literary talent was genuine, yes, and her satire of her own family is perhaps the reason we know them at all. But Nancy is not blameless. Far from it. She created the glittering, brittle shell into which generation after generation of publishers, producers, and socialites have poured their lazy ideas of English eccentricity. We might be tempted to see her as a kind of Mitford Cassandra, mocking the clan even as she loved them. But Cassandra told the truth. Nancy created a beguiling lie.

And let’s not forget the lone Mitford boy, Tom, who conveniently fades into the background of most narratives. He died in Burma in 1945, fighting the Japanese, but not before dabbling in fascist sympathies of his own. He admired the Nazis a bit too much for comfort, attending rallies and buying into their rhetoric.

This was not a pre-war family whose extremes were limited to a few black sheep – for they were nearly all black sheep. They were steeped in radicalism, privilege, and a kind of casual cruelty that, if they’d been born in Salford rather than Swinbrook, would have earned them social services, not society pages. Perhaps it was hardly surprising. Their father, Lord Redesdale, was a member of the Right Club in the 1930s, which was as vile as it gets. The organisation was run by a repulsive Tory MP who penned a hymn called “Land Of Dope And Jewry”, which ended with an exhortation to hang Jewish people.

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What’s more galling is the Mitford industrial complex that surrounds them. You can hardly walk into a bookshop or click on a culture page without some new book about their letters, their lovers, or their hats. If it’s not Unity’s diary, it’s Deborah’s chats with JFK, or Diana’s musings on British fascism, lovingly repackaged by some simpering Mitfordite determined to prove that these girls were “ahead of their time”. They weren’t. They were absolutely of their time: bigoted, blinkered, and bloated on the luxury of never facing consequences.

The devotion to these people baffles me. Why are we so enamoured of a family that embodies every strain of 20th-century political extremism, swaddled in tweed and pearl necklaces? Their letters and diaries are not windows into history – they are shop windows for their own brand. We have allowed them to become the English aristocracy’s celebrities of their time: famous for being famous, lauded for behaving badly, and endlessly profitable as cultural content.

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When Outrageous finishes airing, I pray – vainly, I suspect – that the Mitfords might return to their collective grave in the Oxfordshire churchyard and stay there. But no. There will be another adaptation, another exhibition, another breathless feature that tells us how Diana wore something gorgeous to tea with Hitler. The darkness at the heart of the Mitford siblings will once again be recast as eccentric charm.

Enough. Let us call these pre-war Mitfords what they were: dangerous and deluded. Their antics are not a mirror of our national character. They are a hideous and horrific distortion of it. For the love of all that is historically honest, let’s never reboot it again.

If we must tell stories about 20th-century Britain, let’s tell ones that matter. Ones with real consequences, real courage, and real complexity. The Mitfords had none of these things. They simply had names, money, and an awful lot of luck – luck that, judging by Outrageous, shows no sign of running out.