Macmillan £20 pp356

What sounded like “Jairminny Calling! Jairminny Calling!” was William Joyce’s catchphrase in his morale-lowering propaganda broadcasts from wartime Berlin. An Express journalist said that the broadcaster spoke English “of the haw-haw, dammit-get-out-of-my-way variety”, sparking a newspaper frenzy to identify the traitor while giving Joyce his nom de guerre. Initially, the British public loved what they took to be a Woosterish twit gone to the bad, although middle-class ladies objected that the voice was not quite that of an Oxford man.

They were right, since Joyce actually had a first in English from Birkbeck College. There were other surprises that Nigel Farndale probes in a well-researched and fast-paced book (authorised by Joyce’s daughter) that manages some sympathy for his odious subject, who in another life might have graduated to a drink-sodden death in Soho’s French House (the fate of Joyce’s wife Margaret, who was as loathsome as he).

Joyce was born in New York in 1906 of an Irish father and English mother, who moved back to Galway to run pubs when he was three. By his teens, he had become a fanatical (British) patriot, claiming to be an informer for the Black and Tans, an identification that led him to flee to England to evade the IRA. At college, he switched from the student Conservative Society to a Battersea-based fascist sect. After graduating he eked out a living as a tutor, and had obscure connections with eccentric fascists in MI5. According to newly declassified files Farndale has studied, one arm of MI5 employed Joyce as a source while another bugged his phone.

In 1924, Joyce was slashed with a razor from mouth to ear by communists outside Lambeth baths. From that moment on, “Jewish communists” replaced Fenian rebels in his demonology and Joyce left the Battersea sect to become head “biff boy” in the Chelsea HQ of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Fatefully, in 1933, this Irish-American Nazi applied for a British passport to accompany Mosley on a visit to Germany. He claimed he had been born in Galway, still part of Britain in the early 1900s. The lie would finally cost him his life.

During the 1930s Joyce played “mini-me” to the taller Sir Oswald, although Joyce was himself a compelling Jew-baiting orator. He differed from Mosley in preferring Hitler to Mussolini, and broke with “the Leader” after Mosley’s ignominious retreat during the Cable Street riots. In 1937, Joyce founded a tiny National Socialist League. Realising war was imminent, he and his wife thought of going to neutral Ireland. Following an MI5 tip-off that he was to be arrested, Margaret persuaded him to go to Berlin. He renewed his passport, and days before war broke out, the two watched the White Cliffs of Dover recede as they answered Germany’s call.

Although the Joyces arrived in Germany without a cent, former Nazi contacts from London fixed him up with a radio audition. His broadcasts attracted British press attention that increased his value to the Germans. Goebbels regarded him as priceless, as was soon reflected in the vast sums Joyce (and Margaret) were paid. In September 1940 they became German citizens. They lived high on the hog, acquired lovers and drank too much. In August 1941 they divorced, then remarried in February 1942 in an alcoholic fog.

Joyce was everything the BBC was not: amusing, irreverent and possessed of a good news sense. His broadcasts became a huge success early in the war, parodied by comedians and spread by word of mouth. When the phoney war gave way to Dunkirk and the Blitz, amusement turned to fear as the British imagined that Joyce knew which town clocks were slow and where the Luftwaffe would strike next. The tone became nastier, while both developed a sideline using British POWs to make broadcasts that were even more treasonable than Haw-Haw’s own.

After a last farewell tirade at the microphone, delivered while he was so drunk he could not stand, Joyce went on the run with Margaret, only to be captured in May 1945 by the British. Following a trial for high treason that many lawyers thought a travesty of justice because of Joyce’s by then indeterminate nationality, he was hanged in 1946. MI5 bugged his defence team, helped the prosecution and may have done a deal with Joyce so that he would hang while Margaret would go free. Drinking herself to death in London in 1972 was the fate Joyce probably missed.

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