Like his parents, Max Mosley was resolute in a bad cause
Max Mosely 2009 (PA Images)
During the Battle of Britain, the infant Max Mosley was taken regularly to see his parents, Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley in Holloway Prison, where they were being interned under Defence Regulation 18B. The intelligence services had warned Winston Churchill, that the leader of the British Union of Fascists and his wife posed a security threat at a time when a German invasion seemed imminent. Had they not been so intimate with the Nazi leadership that they were married at Dr Goebbels’ villa in the presence of Hitler himself?
The press demanded that potential traitors be locked up — and so the Mosleys remained guests of His Majesty until 1943, when they were released, unrepentant and without trial. Rumours circulated that Mosley’s considerable wealth was still funding pro-German propaganda. But the Prime Minister was generous under the circumstances: he allowed the Mosleys to live in a house, not a cell, and acceded to Diana’s request to see her baby. She nicknamed Max “der Entschlossene” (“the resolute one”).
The British press had no more resolute foe than Max Mosley, who has died at 81. He was always the adored youngest son of his parents and he returned their devotion. Like Oswald, Max seems to have had the thinnest of skins. The Mosleys, père et fils, could not bear the gentle satire that PG Wodehouse deployed by mocking the “amateur dictator” as Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts and designer of ladies’ lingerie.
Max started life as a pugnacious activist for his father’s Union Movement, campaigning for a neo-fascist “European Union”, but then trained as a barrister and gravitated to motor racing. There he would not be overshadowed — “I thought to myself, I’ve found a world where they don’t know about Oswald Mosley.” Together with his friend Bernie Ecclestone, he was the public face of Formula One. The wealth he made enabled him to enjoy the life of a playboy in Monaco. Ecclestone shared Mosley’s authoritarian politics, once claiming that Hitler “got things done” and that “Max would do a super job” as prime minister. The pair’s brief enthusiasm for Tony Blair in the late 1990s is explicable by the fact that the then Prime Minister personally intervened to secure an exemption for motor sport from his ban on tobacco advertising, a highly lucrative concession that followed Ecclestone’s £1 million donation to Labour. The scandal blew over but the press did not lose interest in Mosley.
Then, in 2008, his private life was exposed by the News of the World. The tabloid published pictures and footage of Mosley engaging in a sadomasochistic orgy with five prostitutes in a Chelsea flat, speaking in German and allegedly with a Nazi theme — an allegation he always denied. He sued for breach of privacy; cross-examined in court about his past racist sympathies, he denied everything. The newspaper was unable to justify its story as in the public interest. He won a landmark case, being awarded £60,000 in damages plus costs. These were just the opening shots in Mosley’s “war” against the press, in which he campaigned to ban “intrusive” reporting of the private lives of celebrities. The phone hacking scandal enabled him to continue his vendetta against the New of the World, which led to the closure of the newspaper and dozens of journalists being dragged through the courts — almost all of whom were acquitted. Mosley spent a fortune funding Hacked Off, the privacy lobby group led by Hugh Grant, and trying unsuccessfully to persuade the European Court of Human Rights to impose a privacy law on the UK. Yet the emergence of a common law protection of privacy is Mosley’s legacy. The Duchess of Sussex is only the latest rich and powerful person to take advantage of the growing body of case law to silence her father and penalise the press for reporting it.
My only encounter with Max Mosley was limited to a brief discussion on the Today programme, in which I defended press freedom against his barrage of invective. As part of its long-running feud with Rupert Murdoch, the BBC gave him a regular platform to denounce the iniquities of “the Murdoch press”. Yet when this most vexatious of litigants was hoist by his own petard, the BBC played down the story.
Three years ago, the Daily Mail found in a Manchester library the proof that had eluded the News of the World in 2008: an obscure pamphlet published on behalf of the Union Movement during the 1961 Moss Side by-election. Among other vile and baseless claims, it alleges that “Coloured immigration threatens your children’s health” and warns voters against immigrants bringing TB, VD and leprosy into Britain. On the back of the pamphlet it states: “Published by Max Mosley.” Here was proof that Mosley, by denying that this pamphlet existed, had committed perjury in order to gain his courtroom victory. But it was he who had the last laugh: the Crown Prosecution Service, perhaps fearful of a jury trial, declined to bring a case against him. Mosley got away with it.
Though I never met Max, I knew his older half-brother, the novelist Nicholas Mosley, who died in 2017 aged 93. Unlike Max, Nicholas not only repudiated his father’s politics but wrote two searingly honest family memoirs, Rules of the Game and Beyond the Pale. Though they were never close, and Nicholas could not condone Max’s role as one of Oswald’s “right-hand men”, he praised his younger sibling’s “brave” rescue of their father when he was set upon in the street in 1962. Typically, Nicholas — a gentle, stammering man of letters — confessed to “atavistic feelings” when he saw photographs of the attack: “Should I, his eldest son, have been there to defend him? But then — what on earth were the people around him doing wheeling him out like an old Aunt Sally?”
Max Mosley was plagued by no such doubts. This deeply flawed yet flamboyant character certainly inherited physical courage from his parents — and though he proved this behind the wheel at terrifying speeds, he also worked tirelessly to make motor racing safer. To his dying day, he always defended his father as “very courageous”. What Max utterly lacked, however, was the moral courage that Nicholas demonstrated in all his books — the courage to publicly reject everything that Diana and Oswald (pictured above) had stood for. He craved their approval, even posthumously. And so when he found his cause, it was not that of defending the truth, however unpalatable, but that of protecting his own privacy and that of other people with something to hide. He was indeed, as his mother said, the resolute one — but resolute in defending the indefensible. Max Mosley, like his parents, was incorrigible.
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