As a young boy, Jonathan Guinness would greet his aunt Jessica Mitford with a Hitler salute.
The gesture was especially provocative during wartime. His stepfather was Britain’s fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, while Mitford was known for her Communist beliefs.
Decades later, while seeking election as a Tory MP and before becoming the 3rd Lord Moyne, Guinness caused another uproar by suggesting that convicted murderers should be left razor blades in their prison cells so they could “do the decent thing” and spare the hangman the task. For years, he insisted he had been misquoted, claiming that by “decent” he had simply meant prisoners should be encouraged to shave every day.
The explanation was difficult to accept, particularly because Guinness embraced his reputation for uncompromising Right-wing opinions. He spoke forcefully on issues including immigration and the restoration of the death penalty, even saying he would personally carry out executions “if it was my duty to do so”.
He said beheading was his preferred form of capital punishment, although he generously proposed that prisoners awaiting execution could first be sedated with pills.
Jonathan Guinness, the stepson of fascist leader Lord Oswald Mosley, has died aged 96
Lord Moyne as a child with his mother, Diana Mitford, and his younger brother Desmond
Sir Oswald Mosley with his wife Lady Diana Mosley – Jonathan’s mother and stepfather
The flamboyance of Guinness’s public persona was matched by a louche private life and a raffish charm that attracted women. For years, he divided his time between his second wife, Suzanne, and his long-term mistress, Susan “Shoe” Taylor, a former hippie who made her home in Cornwall. His two wives and Taylor were the mothers of his eight children, including the eccentric fashion designer and socialite Daphne Guinness.
As a member of the Guinness brewing dynasty, he appeared destined to enjoy all the privileges associated with being born into a fabulously wealthy family. Instead, he endured repeated misfortune and financial collapse, declaring bankruptcy in his 70s and resorting to selling health bracelets to support himself.
Such an unhappy outcome would have seemed unimaginable when he was born in 1930, the elder son of Bryan Guinness, a poet and writer, and Diana Mitford, the society beauty who was one of six famously spirited Mitford sisters.
The Guinness family’s London home was a gathering place for the Bright Young Things, where the parties were lavish and frequent. Evelyn Waugh, who dedicated his novel Vile Bodies to the couple and became Jonathan’s godfather, was a regular visitor, as were John Betjeman, the future poet laureate, and the aristocratic Sitwell siblings.
Jonathan’s younger brother, Desmond, was born in 1931. The boys divided their childhood between the family estates at Biddesden in Wiltshire and Knockmaroon, the large mansion near Dublin’s Phoenix Park.
Their parents’ marriage collapsed after Diana became infatuated with Oswald Mosley, who went on to lead the Blackshirts, the British Union of Fascists. She divorced Bryan Guinness and married Mosley in 1936 in the drawing room of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels’s Berlin home, with Adolf Hitler attending as guest of honour.
When Jonathan was ten, his mother was interned alongside other British fascists under emergency wartime laws and sent to Holloway Prison. She remained there until November 1943, and her admiration for Hitler endured despite the war and the revelations of Nazi atrocities.
Following his parents’ divorce, Jonathan and Desmond lived a mobile childhood, moving between their father’s home in Ireland and the houses shared by their mother and Mosley in Britain.
Guinness inherited his stepfather’s talent for provocation. In 1977, while serving as vice-chairman of the Right-wing Monday Club, he sparked widespread outrage by inviting a former SS colonel to stay at his Kensington home shortly before the man was expelled from Britain by the Home Secretary.
Defending the invitation, Guinness declared: “The man is not a war criminal, nor was he ever accused of being one. He gave evidence at Nuremberg.” He went on: “He joined the SS like people join the Guards, he wasn’t even a Nazi.”
It later emerged that the guest had been Hitler’s adjutant and a close confidant during the war.
Years later, memories of his mother’s internment would help shape Guinness’s polygamous relationship with Shoe Taylor. He met the striking blonde, the daughter of a butcher from Oldham, in 1978 after she arrived at a party at his home in Cadaqués, Spain.
British peer and businessman Jonathan Guinness and his second wife Suzanne outside their Kensington home, London, January 10, 1964
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Lord Moyne with his daughter Daphne Guinness in Paris on her wedding day, October 1987
By then, Jonathan was on his second wife, Suzanne, having divorced Ingrid Wyndham after more than a decade of marriage and three children. She went on to marry his cousin, Tory politician Paul Channon. Their daughter Olivia died of a drugs overdose while a student at Oxford in 1986.
Shoe, meanwhile, had worked at The Beatles’ Apple offices before leaving Britain in the 1960s to see the world, inspired, it was said, by Julie Andrews in The Sound Of Music. It had certainly been a voyage of discovery: she had ridden a hermaphrodite circus elephant in Lebanon, worked topless as ‘the strongest woman in the world’, spent time in prison for drugs offences and been gang-raped in Morocco, a trauma that caused her to become bulimic and lose all her teeth.
When they met, she was living in a stone hut in the foothills of the Pyrenees, eking out a living by selling lavender, performing as an acrobat and offering her services as a masseuse. Holloway prison, where she had served time for possession of cannabis, was the unlikely connection. ‘How interesting,’ Guinness told her, ‘my mother was a political prisoner there during the war.’
Taylor had never heard of Mosley and Guinness liked her lack of interest in politics. They began a correspondence. Guinness, once a fierce critic of the permissive society, and the oddball Shoe soon began an affair. She bore him three children and taught him yoga. Eventually she moved to Cornwall as his mistress and he paid for her upkeep and that of their children, while remaining married to Suzanne.
The arrangement seemed acceptable to both women. ‘I love them both,’ he explained. ‘My wife and Shoe are mature people and they accept the situation.’
Although it was reported at the time that Mrs Guinness, with whom he had two children, ‘tolerated’ the situation ‘despite her opposition to it’.
Shoe’s affair with the Guinness heir was a society rumour for years and remained just that until a newspaper revealed the existence of one of their children. But two more were still to be uncovered.
Guinness decided to make the revelation. ‘A controlled explosion by myself was best,’ he said of his decision to publish his lover’s story, Shoe: An Odyssey Of A Sixties Survivor, in 1989.
The book was intended to head off tabloid headlines but only fuelled his notoriety as a crackpot. It also made him seem a fool.
He had an earlier brush with literary criticism when he co-wrote, with his daughter Catherine, The House of Mitford, which detailed the lives of his mother and her sisters – Nancy, the acerbic novelist; Jessica, known as Decca, the aforementioned Communist; Hitler-loving Unity and Deborah, the duchess of Devonshire.
It had a mixed reception with reviewers accusing him of being too forgiving of Diana and Unity.
His mother’s detention in Holloway had enraged him so much he secretly hoped the Allies would lose the war. When they did not, he adjusted his views from being a fascist sympathiser to a believer in what he called ‘a Machiavellian form of Conservatism’.
After Eton and Oxford, Guinness worked for the Reuters news agency before training as a merchant banker. He was a director of Arthur Guinness from 1961 to 1988.
Politics, though, was his real passion, serving as a county councillor before twice standing unsuccessfully for parliament.
At the Lincoln by-election in 1973, where he made his remark about razors, he finished third. And in 1976, despite having Mrs Thatcher canvassing, he lost the Coventry North West by-election to Geoffrey Robinson, later paymaster general under Tony Blair.
In later years he became entangled in a succession of business scandals. He was the first to call for the dismissal of the family firm’s chief, Ernest Saunders, later jailed over the takeover battle for Scottish whisky company Distillers, but also called for leniency in his sentence.
Guinness’s name was linked to a murky deal involving a Swedish investment company and he was put on trial after £47million disappeared from the firm’s bank accounts. Guinness protested his innocence and was cleared of embezzlement charges in 2001.
Now bankrupt and banned from serving as a company director, he and Shoe sold magnetised wristbands for arthritis sufferers.
Guinness is survived by seven of his eight children after his son Jasper died of cancer in 2011. His eldest son Valentine, 67, succeeds as the 4th Lord Moyne.