Never one to be outdone, Benito Mussolini at last joins the long line of dictators who can lay claim to that prerequisite for the job – being in the pay of the British.
According to the Guardian on October 13th, Italy’s former dictator was an agent for the British Intelligence Agency MI5 for at least one year during World War 1: a nice little earner of £100 a week - £6000 or €6,554 in today’s money - at a time when the average wage in Britain was £1.00 a week.
Cambridge historian Peter Martland stumbled upon this information among Sir Samuel Hoare’s papers, although the matter had been mentioned in Hoare’s 1954 memoirs. - there was no outcry at that time, but then, one wonders how many people read them. It was Hoare, as MI5’s Rome agent, who authorised the payments to Mussolini and, coincidentally, Hoare who signed the 1935 Hoare-Laval Pact giving Italy control over the then Abyssinia.
In 1917 Mussolini was the editor of the Il Popolo d’Italia newspaper, in which he published his own articles exhorting his countrymen to continue to support the Allies. Italy being the least reliable of these, the British needed this propaganda in the country. Just to make sure he got his message across or perhaps as a rehearsal for things to come, Mussolini also sent army veterans to break up peace demonstrations in Milan.
So there you have it: the British really did “take tea with Mussolini”.
