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

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he 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 he fell out with Mosley. I’m Beckett’s biographer. I’m also his son.

So I can tell you authoritatively that he did not bear the smallest resemblance to the Peaky Blinders character. The film Beckett is a villain out of central casting who enjoys killing people, and who says in November 1940 (the year the film is set): “I need to know that you are willing to take part in an act of treason that will decide this war for Germany.”

The real John Beckett would never have said that, and had neither the will nor the skill to invent a complicated scheme to destroy the British economy, as the Peaky Blinders character does. In any case, by November 1940, he was safely locked up in Brixton prison under a wartime regulation that suspended habeas corpus.