A duchess, a Nazi and a socialist walked into a room: The celebrated and scandalous Mitford sisters reunited

June 2025. A drawing room in Oxfordshire. Faint scent of woodsmoke and dog. The sofas are faded chintz, but there are AirPods in a chinoiserie bowl and a smart speaker by the drinks tray, which contains kombucha. French windows open onto a lightly overgrown garden: foxgloves, old roses, the glimpse of a shepherd hut. Inside, all six Mitford sisters have somehow reappeared…

Or perhaps they never left.

Nancy: (jabbing at an iPad) Oh dear, I was looking for Radio H-P but I seem to have ended up in completely the wrong place. What is Only Fans?

Decca: It’s where people sell pictures of their nethers for money.

Nancy: No! Too gruesome. I must look.

Decca: It uses the Marxist model — the asset direct to the consumer, no middleman. It’s commendably democratic, if unspeakably vulgar.

Unity (wistfully): Oh, I think it sounds thrilling. I wish I’d had something like that in Munich.

Diana: Don’t be absurd, Bobo. If you’d had Only Fans the Third Reich would have gone bankrupt.

Nancy: Oh no, imagine! Disaster!

Pamela: The traffic on the A40 was at a standstill again. I had to take the long way round through Burford.

Debo: There are better ways of earning money than showing your bottom. My cookbook made enough for six custom-made henhouses.

Nancy: The one that started ‘I haven’t cooked since the war’?

Everyone screams with laughter.

Decca: Who are you currently stalking, Bobo, now that Penny Mordaunt has her restraining order?

Unity: She was my Valkyrie. My Joan of Arc, but not ghastly and French. I loved her.

Nancy: You should stalk Donald Trump. He’d actively like it. ‘Very aristocratic family—old, old blood. Incredible. Very strong views. Big lady, very blonde, and I like that’.

Diana: Poor man, utter grotesque. But… there’s something about him, all the same, don’t you think?

Nancy: No.

Diana: He commands attention, admit.

Unity: Yes. Marvellous rallies. Such energy. Such love for the leader.

Diana: Those wonderfully vivid red caps, almost like a uniform.

Decca: Don’t start. Either of you. I will cancel you both. Again.

Deborah: Donald Trump rang Chatsworth once. Asked himself to stay.

Everyone screams with laughter.

Nancy: What happened?

Deborah: Nothing. I had a feeling he’d be scared of bats, so I said the house was riddled.

Pamela: They’ve redone the junction at Charlbury and no one knows how to use the roundabout. It's mayhem at rush hour.

Unity: Do we like The King?

Diana: Leave The King alone, Bobo.

Unity: I was only asking.

Nancy: The King is friends with Angela Rayner, you know.

Decca (approvingly): She’d glass you for your chips.

Nancy: I’m not a bit surprised they get on. She’s a Northern, working-class version of Camilla.

Diana: Yes. And in the olden days Camilla would have glassed you for a fag.

Decca: I miss smoking.

Diana: I miss the olden days.

Nancy: Are you at all repentant, Diana?

Diana: No.

Pamela: When I stopped to get fuel, I couldn’t get the cap off. Luckily I had an old cloth in the boot, so I used that, and eventually I managed to prise it off.

Decca: Darling, we die of boredom every time you open your mouth.

Nancy: What I can’t understand, Pam, is that you are married to a millionaire bisexual physicist with incendiary political views. Doesn’t anything interesting ever happen?

Pamela: Oh, him. No. Decca, what is that gingham scarf?

Decca: A kufiyah, Pam. We should all be wearing them in solidarity. Nancy?

Nancy: Hermès is more my thing. Though one is far from unsympathetic.

Diana: Does your scarf make people call you antisemitic?

Decca: Yes. Even when I use my married name.

Diana (really laughing): Too funny.

Decca (furiously): Not a bit funny. 55,000 dead and no one can say ‘poor Gazans’ without losing their job.

Debo: Don’t argue, you two. Everything is grim enough already.

Decca: I’ve had to stop reading the papers lest I combust.

Nancy: On top of which, people wear Crocs.

Decca: Yes, but Crocs are the proletarian ideal—practical and comfortable.

Diana: I would literally rather chop off my feet.

Unity: At least there’s TikTok to keep us amused. Look at this girl. She says she speaks only in ‘affirmations’. You should update U and non-U, Nancy.

Nancy: ‘Get ready with me’. ‘Iconic’. ‘I’m obsessed’. Influencers are the new aristocracy. People have fanbases instead of family seats.

Debo: I have both, heaven.

Nancy: Do you approve of TikTok, Decca?

Decca: I would if the young didn’t seem so full of anxiety. One minute they’re crying everywhere, the next they’re reviewing bronzer. It can’t be good for them.

Diana: In our day, one had a breakdown quietly and then bought a new jewel.

Decca: Now they monetise it—trauma with a brand partnership, welcome to late stage capitalism!

Debo: What’s so odd is that we seem to have become a brand too.

Decca: Yes, but not on purpose.

Nancy: Farve is in a permanent rage about gender-fluidity, have you noticed? Can one be age-fluid? I’d like to be 20 again. With better clothes.

Debo: And better debs’ delights.

Diana: There’s something noble about consistency. Staying oneself, instead of endlessly shapeshifting. One ought to be something. Otherwise it’s all hot air and hashtags.

Nancy: And why is everyone on a ‘journey’ these days? Apart from Diana.

Unity: And Unity.

Decca: Because they sell you personal growth like they used to sell Muv fridges.

Diana: In my day, journeys involved porters, not unresolved trauma and a podcast.

Debo: I tried listening to a podcast about mindfulness. It was 20 minutes of someone panting like a Labrador.

Everyone screams with laughter.

Pamela: Oh! I forgot! I do actually have some news.

Nancy: Have you got a new favourite service station?

Diana: Is there a new layby near Stroud?

Pam (nonplussed): No, of course not. The news is: they’re filming something in Moreton. The crew blocked the high street with a drone van.

Debo: Do we have any food? I’m starving.

Pam: No, no, don’t interrupt, I haven’t finished. Because guess what? The thing they’re filming is about us!

Diana: What, again?

Decca: You’d have thought we’d be historically irrelevant by now. Surely.

Diana: And yet…

Nancy: No, the past is terribly popular. Just not the difficult bits.

Debo: But we are nothing but difficult bits!

Diana: We are fascinating, darling. Always were, always will be. I hope they’ve cast it better this time. The last me had a very common little face.

Decca: I suppose we were brave, in our own way. Privileged and entitled, yes, but fearless, all of us, no matter what it cost us. We followed our hearts. And that never stops being interesting.

Nancy: A toast, I think. Because, incredibly, here we still are.

Unity: Still arguing.

Debo: Still laughing.

Pamela: Still driving.

Decca: Still protesting.

Diana: Still beautiful. I’m sorry, but I just am.

Nancy: To being unkillable.

Unity: And unforgettable.

They toast each other, laughing.

Pamela: The M40 was closed last week for roadworks and no one said a word about it on the radio. It was chaos all the way to Bicester.

Meet the Mitfords

Nancy Mitford

Rapier-witted, chic and acerbic, Nancy Mitford was a highly successful novelist and writer of historical biographies. Following her separation from Peter Rodd, she had a long and somewhat one-sided relationship with French politician Gaston Palewski. She moved to Paris to be near him after the War, and lived there until her death in 1973.

Deborah Mitford

Deborah Mitford married the then Lord Andrew Cavendish in 1942. Following the death of his older brother, he inherited Chatsworth and Deborah unexpectedly found herself Duchess of Devonshire. She liked hens and Elvis Presley and wrote several successful non-fiction books about Chatsworth, which she was instrumental in turning into a successful business. She died in 2014.

Diana Mitford

Diana Mitford, famously beautiful and clever, was married first to Bryan Guinness and, in 1936, to Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. The ceremony took place in Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels’s drawing room, with Adolf Hitler in attendance. The couple both admired Hitler and were imprisoned from 1940-1943. They moved to France in 1951. Her autobiography, A Life of Contrasts, was published in 1977. She died in 2003.

Jessica Mitford

Jessica Mitford ran away to join her cousin, Esmond Romilly, who was fighting in the Spanish Civil War. They later married and moved to the US. Romilly died in 1941. Jessica remarried Robert Treuhaft, a left-wing lawyer. A member of the Communist party, she devoted her life to campaigning for civil rights and social justice. Her non-fiction books include Hons and Rebels (1960) and The American Way of Death (1963). She died in 1996.

Pamela Mitford

Pamela Mitford was the ‘most rural of them all’ according to an unpublished poem by John Betjeman, who was in love with her. She was a poultry expert and married to Prof. Derek Jackson from 1936-51. After her divorce she was the companion of Giuditta Tommasi, an Italian horsewoman.

Unity Valkyrie Mitford

Clumsy, disinhibited and unpredictable, Unity Valkyrie Mitford (conceived in Swastika, Ontario) visited Germany with Diana in 1933, when both attended the first Nazi party congress at Nurenberg. She returned to Germany the following year and, having effectively stalked him, met Hitler in 1935 and became part of his circle. On the day Britain declared war on Germany, she attempted suicide by shooting herself in the head. She was repatriated and lived with brain damage until her death in 1948, cared for by her mother.

Adoringly close as children, Jessica and Diana were estranged from 1936 until their deaths, though they spoke once in 1973 when Nancy was dying.

I have taken tremendous liberties in the scene above.

India Knight’s novel ‘Darling’, a retelling of ‘The Pursuit of Love’ written at the invitation of Nancy Mitford’s estate, is out in paperback (Penguin Fig Tree, £9.99)

'Outrageous', a six-part drama series about the Mitford sisters is available on U and U&DRAMA now. In our interview with star Bessie Carter, daughter of acting royalty Imelda Staunton and Jim Carter, reveals why she loved playing Nancy Mitford on screen and what it feels like to act opposite her mother on the stage.