'Fascist League' from the remnants of the Stamford BNF. In October 1927, he stepped down as a councillor after having served a single term, and retired in June 1928, at 50, before moving to Guildford, Surrey. Imperial Fascist League In 1929, Leese established his own organization, the Imperial Fascist League (IFL). The movement was initially modelled more along the lines of Italian fascism but, under the influence of Henry Hamilton Beamish, it began to focus on anti-semitism. The IFL and its extensive publishing interests were funded out of Leese's own pocket. In 1932, Oswald Mosley approached Leese with the aim of absorbing the IFL into his own British Union of Fascists. Although relations between the two men were initially cordial (Leese had addressed a New Party meeting on 27 April 1932 on the theme of "The Blindness of British Politics under the Jew Money-Power" that was chaired by Mosley), Leese soon attacked Mosley for his failure to deal with the "Jewish question", and he eventually labelled Mosley's group "kosher fascists". Leese's anti-semitism had become his defining political characteristic by that point and it came to take on an increasingly conspiratorial and hysterical tone. This increased after Leese visited Germany and met Julius Streicher, and he subsequently remodelled the IFL newspaper The Fascist along the lines of Der Stürmer. His anti-semitism took on the theme of the Aryan race as the creator of civilisation and culture and he claimed that the Aryan was in a permanent struggle with the Jew, the outcome of which would determine the future completely. His views, which extended to proposing as early as 1935 the mass murder of Jews by the use of gas chambers, earned him a prison sentence in 1936 when he was charged along with fellow IFL member, printer Walter Whitehead, on six counts related to two articles published in the July issue of The Fascist entitled "Jewish Ritual Murder", which later appeared as a pamphlet. He was convicted and jailed for six months in lieu of a fine for causing a public mischief. On his release, he edited another pamphlet entitled My Irrelevant Defence, a lengthy work in defence of his earlier claim that Jewish Passover celebrations included the sacrifice of Christian children. He also used materials distributed by the Welt-Dienst news service headed by Ulrich Fleischhauer and wrote for it. Second World War He was one of the last leaders of