for the Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. In April 1923 he wrote a short pamphlet, Fascism for Old England, praising the Duce and highlighting the "significance of fascism for Britain". He joined the British Fascists (BF) soon after its creation in May 1923, establishing his own branch in Stamford in March 1924, which soon gained 80 members. Leese despised however the BF policy of allowing former socialists and Jews in the party, contending that it was "honeycombed" with communist infiltrators. He further wrote that the BF "did not understand Fascism at all", the true nature of which was to Leese a "revolt against democracy and a return to statesmanship". An animal lover, he also claimed that the style of slaughter practised in Judaism influenced his anti-semitism. Leese joined the Centre International d'Études sur le Fascisme (CINEF), an international 'think tank' based in Switzerland whose aim was the promotion of fascism, and served as its British correspondent. He also became close to one of his neighbours, the economist Arthur Kitson, a member of The Britons. Their friendship lasted until Kitson's death in 1937. The latter persuaded Leese that control of money was the key to power and that money was ultimately controlled by the Jews. Kitson supplied him with a copy of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, on which Leese wrote, "Everything in this little book rang true, I simply could not put it down until I had finished it." Leese also revered The Britons' founder Henry Hamilton Beamish as an anti-Jewish "pioneer". In 1924, he was elected a councillor to Stamford Town Council along with fellow fascist Harry Simpson, becoming the first elected fascist councillors in Britain. The British Fascists had generally chosen not to intervene in "the despised democratic system", and Leese's own contempt for democracy seems to have been paradoxically reinforced by the election. He wrote, "Many people I knew voted for me because I had cured their pigs or pets and without the slightest idea what I stood for". Leese was generally unsatisfied with the policies of the British Fascists, dismissing them as "conservatism with knobs on". In 1925, he and Simpson joined a splinter group of the BF, the National Fascisti (NF), renamed in July 1926 the British National Fascists (BNF). Leese took the Stamford BF branch over to the BNF and, following the collapse of the BNF in May 1927, founded the