Churchill and the Fascist Plot

If your club has ‘Don’t shop at Marks & Spencer’ as one of its rules, it’s probably a very silly club. And so it was with MP Archibald Ramsay’s The Right Club, a club formed in 1939 which consisted of powerful, aristocratic and influential people united by their extreme right-wing views and anti-semitism. But as well as possessing a ridiculous, disorganised quality, The Right Club was also a potentially massive threat to national security, not least because of its access to secret exchanges between Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt.

Charting the group’s activities and its subsequent discovery and dissolution at the hands of spymaster Maxwell Knight (reputedly the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s ‘M’), this is an informative account of a relatively little-known domestic threat faced by Britain in the early months of the war. The footage and silent background re-enactments don’t offer much, but the narration and snippets from noted historians make this a worthwhile watch.