style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">For all his demagoguery, Mussolini was widely admired in prewar Britain. Newspapers (notably Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail) carried flattering photographs of the dictator; Mussolini was on good terms with King George V, moreover, who in 1923 publicly congratulated him on his “wise leadership”. Parts of the British establishment initially saw a potential ally in Mussolini and a bulwark against Hitler’s Germany. The “virile” alternative of Fascism in the 1920s appealed to many Britons disgruntled by an age of leftist poets, flappers and perceived Judeo-Bolshevik threats.