Even at Oxford he battled with the Press
Today Mosley’ s trust has given £3.8 m to fund a State-approved Press regulator no national paper will signup to. He’ s also trying to ban any mention of his in famous orgy. Now we reveal how...
VANNI TREVES CBE, the distinguished former chairman of Channel 4 and insurance giant Equitable Life, still feels anger at a vicious spat over racism that exploded at Oxford University half a century ago. ‘I thought he was a disgusting human being (then) and nothing I have read, seen or heard since has changed my mind,’ Treves says of political donor and Press law lobbyist Max Mosley. ‘In fact, I think he is dangerous, because he combines malign views with intelligence and fluency.’
Treves, whose Italian Jewish father died fighting the Nazis, and Max Mosley — whose father Sir Oswald spoke of the ‘stink of the Jew’ — were, as we shall see, among a small cast of players in a drama which, 50 years later, has taken on a new significance with Mosley’s funding of a State-approved regulator of the UK Press.
The story begins one weekday evening in May 1958. A by-election was due to take place in two days’ time in the Islington North constituency — now represented by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The Conservative grandee Lord Hailsham, who served as party chairman, was advertised to address a public meeting in support of the Tory candidate. Trouble was anticipated.
Lord Hailsham might have expected to face routine heckling in this Labour stronghold. But in previous months a far more sinister threat to free speech had emerged.
A Conservative minister had been driven from the stage at another political event by thugs from the Union Movement (UM), the post-war reincarnation of Sir Oswald Mosley’s anti- Semitic British Union of Fascists.
So it was that a number of journalists, among them a reporter and photographer from this newspaper, were in attendance to witness how the largerthan-life Hailsham would fare. They did not have long to wait.
The resulting Daily Mail article was headlined ‘Hooligans Wreck Hailsham Rally’.
‘ Rowdies’ chanting ‘ Mosley, Mosley’ had ‘fought his stewards, jumped on chairs and showered the audience with leaflets’ said the report.
AS CHAOS reigned, Lord Hailsham told his audience: ‘ Keep your seats, ladies and gentlemen. I am told these are fascists. Take no notice of this organised hooliganism. ‘Up with free speech.’ Who were these enemies of free speech? The picture published in the Mail alongside the report still possesses a raw power. In the foreground, a man appears to be held in a headlock. Two of the ‘fascist’ invaders have their hands on him, their faces taut with excitement or exertion.
Neither the picture caption nor the report identified them.
They were in fact Sir Oswald’s teenage sons, Alexander and Max, engaged in their father’s dirty work. The picture would later become the centre of a furore over Press freedom which has ramifications for today.
Pieced together from archival researches and interviews with contemporaries, this is the untold story of Max’s first clashes with the journalists who crossed him.
They long predate the 2008 News of the World article which exposed his predilection for sadomasochistic orgies with prostitutes and led to his victory at a landmark privacy trial during which, as the Mail revealed earlier this week, Mosley gave misleading evidence about his racist past.
The Mail also revealed he had visited Dachau concentration camp with convicted neo-fascists and a Holocaust denier, on their way to meet former Waffen-SS officers. He also fought antifascist demonstrators in a Jewish quarter of London.
These episodes all lay a few years ahead when Max Mosley went up to Oxford to study physics in the autumn of 1958. His years at university were marked by further bitter controversy and his involvement in a deeply disturbing case of Press censorship — one that has had echoes in his treatment of the media in recent years.
By his own admission ‘very weak academically’, Max gained a place at the then socially exclusive Christ Church, thanks to the economics don Roy Harrod, an old friend of Max’s Hitler worshipping mother Diana (one of the famous Mitford sisters).
Archives show that Max was accepted even though he failed a maths paper.
In handwritten letters held at the British Library, Max tells Harrod: ‘It really is extremely kind of you to take so much trouble,’ while Diana tells ‘Dearest Roy’ that ‘your letter was so valuable as I’m sure Max had no notion how to [get into Oxford despite his shortcomings]’.
Mosley’s arrival at the university was to prove explosive.
It was in Max’s second year that his father spoke at the Oxford Union — the first of three appearances at the university in just eight months.
Student journalist and subsequent Channel 4 boss Vanni Treves was present for Isis magazine, and wrote a splenetic report of the event in May 1960.
He said that the debating society had shown the fascist a ‘ nauseating respect’. He denounced Sir Oswald as a ‘ monstrous individual’ who ‘ has been a Negro-hater and Jew-baiter for the last 30 years’.
Max was outraged by the Treves article. In a letter printed in the next Isis edition, he defended his father’s racist policies.
A bitter correspondence between Treves and Mosley Junior followed in the pages of Isis.
Treves, who as a toddler lived an Anne Frank existence hidden from the Nazis in Rome, was ‘one of the minor nuisances of Oxford life’ Max sneered.
Treves described Max as having ‘loutish tendencies once typified by his father, but who clearly has not his brains’.
Re-reading his words at his West End office recently, Treves said quietly to himself: ‘ Good for me.’
Another to challenge Max in the pages of Isis was David de Vere Webb, who was secretary of the Liberal Association in North Kensington, an area which included Notting Hill, where a young black man named Kelso Cochrane was murdered by a white gang in May 1959.
In a letter to the Isis editor, Webb wrote: ‘As with the Jews in the Thirties, there were thugs, threats, insults and intimidation in Notting Hill.
‘[Oswald] Mosley took care in general and in public to give encouragement only by the provision of bogus intellectual backing (e.g. niggers out = better housing, more food, better jobs). That there were more intimate connections between thuggery and Mosley, Max Mosley knows as well as anyone (perhaps best of all).’
Max’s public profile was about to increase — and with it the controversy surrounding him.
In November 1960, he was elected secretary to the prestigious Oxford Union debating society, which for generations has been the training ground for so many famous politicians.
‘The Union at that time was a political epicentre; it was able to attract speakers of international importance,’ recalls Treves.
‘It was therefore an accolade to be invited to speak, the attendance at the debates was huge. Anyone with any social or political interest would want to be there.
‘Where else could you have a Prime Minister coming to talk to undergraduates and the [speech] being reported in The Times?’
But of course the Oxford Union wasn’t the only union that Max Mosley was a part of — he was also involved with his father’s UM party.
The Observer later described Max’s election to his student position as UM’s ‘most important recent electoral success’ while Action, the UM’s racist newspaper, celebrated the event as ‘an encouragement to all who openly declare their convictions’. Action told its fascist readership: ‘ He [Max] was often told he could never be elected to any position unless he concealed his Union Movement opinions.’
( In March 2009, Mosley told MPs on a select committee investigating privacy he was warned off the Oxford Union because of his family name, not because of his own neo-fascist views, which he didn’t mention.)
Within weeks of Max’s victory, his father was speaking at the university’s Humanist Society on the subject of ‘race relations’.
DAVID ASHTON — who recalled to the Mail in part one of our investigation how, as a young neo-fascist, he had been recruited at Oxford by Max to help his father, and who remains a presence on racist website forums five decades later — was in the audience.
Ashton says: ‘ The reason why Oswald Mosley took advantage of occasional university invitations, and tried to gain support among students and teachers, is surely obvious.’
Yes, it gave him a respectable platform, but Sir Oswald’s Oxford appearance and what he said still caused an uproar. It would start a train of events which would culminate in Mosley critics being sensationally suppressed.
The satirical college publication Parson’s Pleasure — regarded as a forerunner of Private Eye — was then edited by Noel Picarda, who had interviewed Sir Oswald for Isis the previous year.
Research in the Bodleian Library archive reveals the student journalists at Parson’s Pleasure had come to know of Max’s part in the trouble at that Lord Hailsham rally in 1958.
On January 25, Picarda’s paper predicted that ‘before the term is out something really sinister will emerge from Max Mosley’s past’.
In the same issue, Picarda offered Max ‘two pages to explain and defend his political views and to answer these questions: Do you support the British Union Movement? Do you stand by your father’s statements before and after the war? Do you believe in violence?’
On the same day Isis, edited by Paul Foot (later to achieve acclaim as a brilliant investigative journalist), asked in an editorial why Sir Oswald was invited to speak so often at the university
when he ‘has done his best for 30 years to stir up racial violence’.
Parson’s Pleasure then reported that Max warned Foot to his face that his father would sue Isis. It was not an idle threat. By exercising his right to express what most would consider to be fair comment, Foot had doomed his editorship, as we shall see.
The university newspaper Cherwell also weighed in.
Its next edition carried a frontpage report of the ‘race relations’ speech at Oxford in which Sir Oswald had said: ‘The Negroes feel themselves thoroughly grey and inferior and want to make the world one grey mess.’
The furore was building. Parson’s Pleasure published Max Mosley’s response to its invitation for him to set out his views.
Max outlined his own inclination for a ‘total’ apartheid in Africa.
He also wrote: ‘I feel that the West Indian immigrants now in this country should return home, and Britain should build up the industries of the West Indies by buying their sugar and citrus products, bauxite and so on, thus giving the immigrants the prospect of good jobs at home as an incentive to return.’
He responded to the written questions set by the editors. Yes, he supported the UM, he said.
Asked ‘ do you stand by your father’s statements before and after the war?’ Max said: ‘All that I have come across. Yes.’
Replying to the question on violence: ‘This question is vague. If you mean in support of a political belief, no. If you mean as a defence when physically attacked, yes.’
On February 15, Cherwell, which had also been attacked by Max for its reporting of Sir Oswald, gave him space for a piece about his beliefs. Headlined ‘ The Union Movement: What it stands for’ the jaw-dropping article includes Max’s detailed vision of how black Africans should be denied civil and voting rights in vast swathes of the continent. What is also noteworthy is his use of the word ‘we’.
He wrote: ‘ We believe that in real life the African problem is no longer soluble without a complete division of territory.’
The division of blacks from whites would be based on ‘climate’, he said. Whites would have one-third of the continent including South Africa and part of the Kenya highlands with a land ‘ bridge’ to their racial brethren in Europe, via Algeria.
Any blacks who chose to remain in white areas would be stripped of the vote and all civil rights — and whites would lose their rights in black areas.
This was from a man who in 2008 would declare when asked about such views — in the context of the success of mixed-race F1 driver Lewis Hamilton — ‘Everyone who knows me knows I abhor prejudice of any kind’.
On February 24, Parson’s Pleasure promised: ‘Tomorrow’s [edition] will include “Mosley THE FACTS”.’ But the next edition did not appear — and never would. College authorities suppressed it.
On March 1, 1961, Cherwell reported the demise of Parson’s Pleasure magazine.
The Mail has obtained a copy of the banned edition from a private source. The front page carries the Mail photo of the Hailsham fracas.
The back page editorial reads: ‘At the beginning of this term people thought “Max isn’t really a bad chap. He defends his father, that’s all. He isn’t really a fascist.”
‘But he is . . . he subscribes to the vicious doctrines of apartheid; he subscribes to government by cabinet without parliamentary debate . . . He has cheerfully admitt e d before witnesses that Notting Hill incidents were to him “fun”. He enjoys “punch-ups”.
‘He likes being howled down. He feels that it is he and Dad against the world . . .
‘Max goes on down his greasy path following his sleazy policies and a parental example of how to waste a life.’
In the Cherwell report on the censorship of Parson’s Pleasure, Max was quoted as saying of the photograph that Parson’s Pleasure had tried to run: ‘I am not hitting anyone in the tussle, as the picture was intended to suggest.
‘I was separating a friend of mine [his brother, in fact] from someone who attacked him. Numerous photographs were taken . . . the Daily Mail published it because it was the only one showing violence.’
A week later, Cherwell published a letter which was signed by future Conservative MP Iain MacDonald Sproat, disputing Mosley’s account.
The letter claimed Max had in fact admitted in front of three witnesses: ‘It was a beautiful straight left.’ The letter went on: ‘He [Max] said this pointing to himself in the picture.’
(The following year, he would reportedly tell an undercover reporter: ‘In our kind of politics one needs to be as good at a punch- up as at talking to a university professor.’)
The Times and the Oxford Mail also reported the promised expose of Max as an apparently significant factor in the closure of Parson’s Pleasure. Whether this was so — Max had a powerful friend at Christ Church in economics Fellow Roy Harrod, remember — is unclear. Research in the university archive suggests that the proctors — guardians of discipline — officially felt the edition was ‘ obscene’ though they do not specify why. It certainly appeared that Max Mosley and his ‘Dad’ had silenced their newspaper enemies. Isis had also caved in and printed a craven apology to Sir Oswald Mosley for saying he had stirred up racial violence. That same day, the Daily Telegraph and Oxford Mail reported the resignation of Paul Foot from the Isis editorship. Foot told the latter: ‘ Sir Oswald’s solicitors asked us to apologise for the item. ‘The proprietors agreed. I had nothing to do with the apology and was opposed to it and so I resigned the editorship.’ At the end of his third and final year, Max decided to ‘have another attempt’ at becoming Union president — the top job at the debating society. ‘But by then it seemed the name [Mosley] had become a problem,’ he recounted in his 2015 memoir. ‘So I thought why not try again but without the name? I decided to reappear as an Indian and visited a theatrical costumier to acquire the disguise.’
SIR Oswald’s neo-fascist, apartheid- supporting son recalled with obvious amusement attending an Oxford Union debate and a drinks party afterwards in such garb.
There was one worry. ‘There had been the occasional racist attack in the area where we lived, so I felt slightly uneasy, but went ahead anyway and was immediately fascinated by how differently people treated me in my Indian persona.’
In the end, Max decided against standing for president.
In his 2015 autobiography, he glossed over these two years of clashes with university journalists in 11 disingenuous words: ‘ There were tiresomely hostile articles in some of the undergraduate press.’
His reticence is typically selfserving and again reveals an extraordinary ability to forget crucial details from his past.
How bitterly ironic that his 2012 written submission to the Leveson Inquiry included a statement about the ‘ importance for the public interest of a free press in a democracy, freedom of expression and investigative journalism’.
But most of all one recalls his boast to the News of the World privacy trial.
He was, he said, ‘impressed with myself, I have to say, that [the defence] have not been able to find one single thing which I regret saying even now however many years, 50 years, later’.
Ex-Channel 4 boss Vanni Treves said this week he certainly doesn’t regret what he said back then: ‘I stand by every word I wrote.’
Will Labour deputy leader Tom Watson continue to stand by his equally unrepentant but very financially generous ‘ friend’, Max Mosley?