History: If you end up with an Astra the next time you hire a car at Heathrow airport, take a good look at it.
Your smartly valeted interior will look like an Astra, feel like an Astra and the car will drive like an Astra. But if you look carefully, you will notice one small but significant detail which makes that car different to the same one hired anywhere else in Europe. On the steering wheel there is a cheerful little griffin with a flag in his hand. For this is a Vauxhall Astra, not an Opel Astra. And the reason the griffin is there is because in England the Opel insignia - a silver bolt of lightning - means something else. For it was the symbol of Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF). This residual British reluctance to sport a fascist emblem on the bonnet of their family hatchbacks is probably the BUF's only lasting legacy.
It is difficult now to take Oswald Mosley seriously. In his grey lounge suits and black polo necks he looks more like a louche Cambridge don than a threat to western democracy. At rallies he would play up to his admiring female audiences by flashing a quick smile at them while caressing his moustache with one hand and slapping his thigh with the other. "Oh Valentino!" they would cry in return.
It was that kind of reaction, writes Martin Pugh in this splendid book, that saw him "easily misled by enthusiastic mass rallies, interpreting each ephemeral triumph as a genuine upsurge of support."
The symbolic test of strength came in October 1936 during the "Battle of Cable Street." Mosley announced his intention to march with his Blackshirts through the East End of London. Around 3,000 fascists arrived to be confronted by up to 300,000 protesters.
When the metropolitan police told Mosley to abandon the march, he backed down (much as Eoin O'Duffy had three years earlier in Dublin). Humiliatingly, the Blackshirts were escorted back to the Embankment under police guard to stop them being lynched.
Mosley's fascists were a joke, but Pugh argues that is no reason to ignore them. Indeed, some of the most exciting academic work on inter-war Britain has come from scholars who have explored the gossamer threads running between "respectable" public figures - Conservative MPs, media barons and even the royal family - and fascist ideology.
"Far from being marginal," Pugh argues, "fascists and their ideas were centrally involved in many of the major controversies of the inter-war period", including the General Strike, the Great Depression and how to deal with Hitler.
He meticulously charts the development of fascist ideology in Britain, its pervasive influence throughout society in the early 1930s and its eventual rejection as something sinister and alien. "Liberalism worked after all," concludes Pugh, "and it was probably the only thing that did."
If Hurrah for the Blackshirts! has a hero (albeit one Pugh is ambivalent about) it is surely the Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin.
His historical reputation is low, but repeatedly in this narrative he represents the centre that holds against extremes on both right and left. He gave Labour its first taste of power, dealt with the General Strike, sacrificed party for country by serving in a national government, negotiated the abdication of Edward VIII (who at the very least flirted with fascism) and began the process of rearmament that prepared Britain for war. Often photographed with a pig under his arm, there were few, if any, who cried "Oh Valentino!" during his public speeches. But interwar Britain had far more cause to cry "Hurrah for Stanley Baldwin" than ever it did for the Blackshirts.
Baldwin represented a middle way that encapsulated the British (especially English) preference for common sense and fair play over ideology. To outsiders, it could seem inexplicable. The famous football match played in 1926 between the strikers and the police at Plymouth led one bemused French observer to remark: "The English are not a nation, they are a circus." King George V thought it represented something rather different. "Our dear old country can be well proud of itself," he wrote in his diary, "as during the last nine days there has been a strike in which four million men have been affected; not a shot has been fired and no one killed". Martin Pugh shows that the fascist threat was a real one, but in the end it got nowhere because most people thought all those funny walks and sinister uniforms were just - well - plain silly.
Richard Aldous teaches international history at UCD. His Macmillan, Eisenhower and the Cold War will be published by Four Courts Press this month
Hurrah for the Blackshirts! Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars by Martin Pugh. Jonathan Cape, 387pp. £20