The Peaky Blinders film is pandering to these populist times – I should know, the Nazi in it is my father | Francis Beckett

The film-makers would say they’re making drama, not history. But this is not the moment for yet another second world war film with a heroic myth The new Peaky Blinders film, The Immortal Man, offers us a character, John Beckett, who is a British Nazi. One of the two founders of Britain’s first Nazi party in 1937, alongside William Joyce and John Angus Macnab, was indeed a man named John Beckett. He had been director of publications for Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, but that year ...

By Francis Beckett