LOSING YOUR SHIRT, BLACK or OTHERWISE

I cannot imagine that I would hit it off very readily with Max Mosley. The president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile has always moved in worlds that would bore me as much as they would repel me: motor-racing, engineering and right-wing politics. Mosley was born into the latter; his parents married in 1936 at the home of Joseph Goebbels, with Reich Chancellor Hitler the only other guest not present in the role of witness. His father was Sir Oswald, the 6th Baronet Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists (known as the Blackshirts), and his mother was Diana Guinness, third of the celebrated Mitford sisters. After World War II, during which the Mosleys were interned, Sir Oswald attempted to rekindle his messianic political career and launched the so-called Union Movement in 1948.

From his teens, Max Mosley was active in the Union Movement and often acted as an advocate and apologist for his father’s views and political actions. When the Union Movement collapsed, he tried to forge a career as a Tory politician but found that his name counted against him. Given the alleged Nazi role-playing involved in the evening of sado-masochism that was the centre of Mosley’s just-concluded court case against the News of the World, it may be surmised that his name still carries a large degree of baggage.

The tabloid splashed its story in March under the headline ‘F1 BOSS HAS SICK NAZI ORGY WITH HOOKERS’. In this bizarre sentence, ‘F1’ means Formula One, the type of motor racing that the FIA administers, and ‘hookers’ (a somewhat outmoded term, it might be thought) means the five women who supplied Mosley with sexual favours for payment of £500 each. One of the ‘hookers’ also took £12,500 from the tabloid for secreting a camera into the ‘orgy’ (the results of which, I understand, could be temporarily admired on the tabloid’s website) and a further £10,000 from Sky News for an ‘exclusive’ interview. The News of the World and Sky News, it will be remembered, are both owned by that noted family man, Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch organisations therefore paid the woman 45 times more for her cooperation than did Mosley for her sexual services. Perhaps the term ‘hooker’ needs to be re-examined.

In a further strange wrinkle to the case, the husband of the wired-up ‘hooker’ was obliged to resign his post as a result of the publicity fall-out from the case; he was an employee of MI5. The now out-of-work spook may feel that he is harder done by than anyone else caught up in this curiously English affair.

Mosley himself decided to tough it all out. He called an Extraordinary General Meeting of the FIA and won a comfortable if not resounding vote of confidence. His term had already been artificially extended and has been marked by recurring controversy and bad feeling, so Mosley cannot have been sure that he would carry the day. In the event, many voices influential in the sport and its administration have been raised to advise him to resign. He has not so far done so and I cannot say that I blame him. To resign now would be to hand a suggestion of moral victory to the tabloid, even while it is licking its wounds at the record £60,000 damages and a substantial slice of the £450,000 costs.

Mr Justice Eady very properly articulated the point of law upon which the case hinged: “The claimant had a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to sexual activities … carried on between consenting adults on private property”. This was the nub of the case against the paper, whose reporters had clearly made a gross invasion of Mosley’s privacy, without ensuring that there was a watertight justification in so-called public interest.

What Mosley chooses to do with his privacy is nobody else’s business. The tabloid tried to dress its synthetic outrage (read: “glee at a juicy story”) with high-horse stuff about Nazis. Eady found “no evidence that the gathering [sic] … was intended to be an enactment of Nazi behaviour” and saw “no basis at all for the suggestion that the participants mocked the victims of the Holocaust”. Nor indeed ought it to matter a tuppenny damn if he had found such evidence. No victims of the Holocaust would have known of the ‘orgy’ if the tabloid had not reported it. People may strike whatever political stance they care to in private, without fear of reprisal or penalty.

The tabloid’s editor, Colin Myler, issued a statement outside the high court which declared that “taking part in depraved and brutal S&M orgies does not, in our opinion, constitute the fit and proper behaviour to be expected of someone in his hugely influential position”. He said Mosley had been guilty of “serious impropriety”, the kind of orotund pronouncement on the sexual behaviour of others that we haven’t heard uttered by anyone save with satirical intent in forty years. The hypocrisy of scandal-sheet editors knows no bounds. Myler wouldn’t know fit and proper behaviour if it jumped up and bit him in the leg.

The editor also declared that “our press is less free today after another judgment based on privacy laws emanating from Europe”. If the press is less free to spy on adults disporting themselves in whatever way they choose, then good for European legislators. But it is another intriguing aspect of this case that the Murdoch press, always anti-Europe, sees the judgment as a stick with which to beat Strasbourg while the Union Movement, in which Mosley cut his political teeth, was an early advocate of a Europe united into one superstate.

‘The freedom of the press’ and ‘the public’s right to know’ are two of the most abused rallying-cries of the modern era. The press is only as free as the international capital that controls it will permit it to be. Journalists are constrained by the writ of the proprietors fed down to them through editorial control. The duties of the press are more socially significant than its trumpeted but compromised freedoms. And the public has no right to know merely out of curiosity or prurience. There was nothing in the News of the World’s sting on Max Mosley that had any merit. It was another example of Oscar Wilde’s sly characterisation of “the English country gentleman galloping after a fox – the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable” [A Woman of No Importance Act I]. At least Mosley got the result denied to Wilde.