Oxford’s ‘hypocrisy’ over Mosley money
OXFORD University has been accused of a “moral failure” after accepting a multi-million-pound donation from the Mosley family.
The university was given £6million from a charitable trust set up by Max Mosley from the fortune he inherited from his father, Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists.
Two colleges – St Peter’s and Lady Margaret Hall – have also accepted cash from the Mosley family trust totalling over £6.3million. Max Mosley signed off the accounts that confirmed the donations shortly before his death in May.
Last night, a senior Oxford don accused the university of “vast hypocrisy”. Prof Lawrence Goldman, emeritus fellow in history and a former vice-master of St Peter’s, said he was “shocked” the donations were accepted as “the university has gone off the scale in wokery”, referring to moves to decolonise the curriculum and the Rhodes statue row.
Prof Goldman, who lost relatives in the Holocaust, added: “Its moral compass is just not working anymore. There has been a total moral failure.”
Lord Mann, the Government’s antisemitism tsar, said: “If Oxford is trying to rehabilitate the Mosley family name in any way, they can expect a very hostile response. I don’t imagine people would be very happy to have a Mussolini building, or a Hitler scholarship. People in this country will feel the same way in relation to the Mosley name.”
Max Mosley took up his father’s cause during the late Fifties and Sixties by supporting the activities of the Union Movement, the successor to the BUF.
Prof Goldman said he had spent the past five months trying to persuade St Peter’s to refuse its £5million donation. In June he wrote to all the fellows on the college’s governing body, warning that taking funds from the “most infamous fascist dynasty in the English-speaking world” would be a “disaster”.
Prof Goldman told The Daily Telegraph: “Max Mosley has been going round terrorising people and has never apologised. We shouldn’t be dealing with him. This is an open and shut case.” The donations have been made from the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust, which Max Mosley set up in the name of his son, an alumnus of St Peter’s, who died of a heroin overdose in 2009.
The £6million donation to the university will be used to set up the Alexander Mosley Professor of Biophysics Fund, while the £5million donation to St Peter’s will be used to build a new block of student accommodation.
The building was due to be called Alexander Mosley House, but The Telegraph understands that following representations from another donor, the college will now consult with students over the name. The trust’s 2017 accounts show that St Peter’s had previously accepted a sum of £1,102,250.
Lady Margaret Hall was given a smaller sum from the Mosley trust of £260,000 to fund its foundation year.
Robert Halfon, the chairman of the Commons education select committee, said: “I find it distressing that Oxford University is so keen to go on about diversity and inclusion but is prepared to take the shilling from such sources. It seems that wokeness goes out the window. I suspect students will be asking for the money to be returned.” A spokesman for the Campaign Against Antisemitism said Oxford should “think hard” about accepting the donation.
The university, St Peter’s and Lady Margaret Hall all said the funds were cleared by an independent committee, taking “legal, ethical and reputational issues into consideration”. A university spokesman said the donations “were all considered and approved by the university’s committee to review donations and research funding”.
St Peter’s said the trust’s “generous” donation will make a “transformative” difference to students. Lady Margaret Hall said the donation “enabled a cohort of students from very diverse and lowincome backgrounds to attend Oxford”.
The Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust was contacted for comment.
THERE is no more poisonous family name in recent British political history. But it has not stopped the University of Oxford grasping with both hands more than £12 million in donations from The Alexander Mosley Trust, a charitable fund primarily established on the back of money inherited from Sir Oswald Mosley, the notorious leader of the British Union of Fascists.
The trust was established by Max Mosley in the name of his son Alexander who died tragically at the age of 39 from an accidental drugs overdose. Max Mosley, who passed away in May at the age of 81 from cancer, was a controversial figure in his own right, acting as an election agent in 1961 for a fascist candidate at a by-election that included publishing a leaflet that warned voters that “coloured immigration threatens your children’s health”. On another occasion he was arrested after throwing punches at anti-fascist protesters during a march in support of his father.
Welcome to a world in which the University of Oxford, the oldest in the English-speaking world, eats itself up over whether to tear down a historic statue but dismisses any moral or ethical concern over the acceptance of a gift from the Mosley family. In an interview with the BBC in 2017, when asked if the trust’s money came from his father, Max Mosley declared: “Not put together by my father – my father inherited it from his father and from his father. The whole of the middle of Manchester once belonged to the family, that’s why there’s a Mosley Street.”
At a university as sensitive as Oxford to the feelings of others – one college removed octopus from its menu so that disadvantaged students at meal times felt more “comfortable” and Theresa May’s portrait was taken down from the geography department so as not to antagonise EU students – the Mosley cash has trumped any queasiness.
This turning of a blind eye – as one eminent Oxford academic has complained – has caused St Peter’s College to be £5million wealthier as a result of what it happily calls a “generous gift”. The money is being spent on new student accommodation in the centre of Oxford. Alexander Mosley House, as it was intended to be named, will open its doors to students in the autumn of 2022, although the college has been forced into a rethink on the name. Alexander Mosley had studied at St Peter’s as a maths undergraduate.
Although less than 100 years old, St Peter’s occupies a prime spot in Oxford, close to the city’s castle, and its alumni include Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, Geordie Greig, the editor of the Daily Mail, Ken Loach, the film director, Paul Condon, the ex-metropolitan Police Commissioner, and Hugh Fearnley-whittingstall, the celebrated chef.
Meanwhile, the Alexander Mosley Professor of Biophysics Fund, worth a further £6million, was received “with gratitude” by the university itself. The choice of professor is made by the university’s vice-chancellor in conjunction with the master of St Peter’s College among others. A second college – Lady Margaret Hall – took £260,000 to pay for disadvantaged students to spend a year at the college. Its principal was Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of The Guardian, who retired from the post at the start of this academic year. The newspaper shared with Max Mosley a common enemy: the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, more of which later.
The payments are detailed in among other places the latest accounts of the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust, whose chairman of trustees until his death was Max Mosley.
Lest anyone forget, Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, was interned along with his wife Diana Mitford during the war for the threat they posed. The couple had married in 1936 in Berlin at the home of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister for propaganda. The guest of honour was Adolf Hitler.
Nobody would want to blame Max Mosley for the sins of his father, but the man who would go on to run the sport of motor racing had been a keen supporter of his father’s new post-war party, the far-right Union Movement.
Max Mosley had been charged with assault and later acquitted for throwing punches at anti-fascist protesters in east London in 1962, while the year before, having graduated from Oxford University, he was a party election agent responsible for an election leaflet that included the disgusting, racist slur that “coloured immigration threatens your children’s health”.
Asked about his leaflet, when it was rediscovered in 2018, Mosley was hardly contrite. He refused to say sorry, finally conceding to Channel 4 News in an excruciating interview: “I think that probably is racist, I will concede that completely,” before adding that he had “no reason to apologise to anyone”.
In 2019, a year after Mosley’s carcrash interview, the trust was beginning negotiations with St Peter’s College over a possible legacy.
‘Some might call it blood money. Everything about the Mosley family and Mosley name is tainted’
Prof Lawrence Goldman, an emeritus fellow and a former editor of the prestigious Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, says he was first made aware of the plans in February this year in a zoom call with the current master Prof Judith Buchanan.
“The master mentioned that a new building will be named after Alexander Mosley and I was one of the few people old enough to remember we had educated the boy,” he recalled. But the death of Max Mosley in May – and a thorough reading of his obituaries, made him realise he could not sit back in silence.
In May, Prof Goldman wrote to Prof Buchanan and again in June, urging her to reconsider.
“Max Mosley was a fascist and racist for a significant part of his life when he was in his twenties, after he had graduated from Oxford,” he wrote.
“He supported his father’s Union Movement, took part in anti-semitic demonstrations, and published material containing the most heinous defamations of black immigrants to this country, and non-whites in general.
“All this occurred after the Holocaust. All this was a matter of public record and could have been unearthed by basic historical research.”
He warned that to accept the funds was not only “morally insensitive” but also “politically naive”, adding: “Some might call it blood money. Everything about the Mosley family and Mosley name is tainted and the college should have had nothing to do with either.”
Prof Goldman, a fellow of St Peter’s College for 24 years, wrote plaintively of his own family’s experience to underline his opposition to the donation.
“My story is not uncommon. My grandfather lost two siblings, their spouses, and five nieces and nephews in the Holocaust,” he wrote. His father’s family, moreover, had come from Dalston in east London, where “Oswald and Max Mosley decided to launch their anti-semitic campaign in 1962, two decades after other families called Goldman were murdered in Poland for the crime of being Jewish”.
He went on: “There are, in fact, many people alive today who share a family history like this. And there are many black families also who know and fear
‘Though you may not realise it, you are each party to a highly “unusual” act: taking funds from the most infamous fascist dynasty in the Englishspeaking world, the Mosley family’
the name of Mosley. The Governing Body [of St Peter’s], lacking in British historical knowledge and sensitivity, may have underestimated the degree of feeling incited by the name Mosley.”
Twice he wrote to Louise Richardson, Oxford University’s vice-chancellor, but received no reply.
Exasperated, Prof Goldman wrote an open letter in June to all the governing body fellows of St Peter’s College, appealing to each of them personally to use their vote to stop the donation. “It is unusual to address the fellowship in this way but my attempts to start a dialogue with senior officers of the college have failed,” he wrote to them. “Though you may not realise it, you are each party to a highly ‘unusual’ act: taking funds from the most infamous fascist dynasty in the English-speaking world, the Mosley family.”
Accepting the money, he warned, would not only be a “disaster” for the college but also poses a “reputational threat” to Oxford as a whole.
In response, he received a formal letter from the college’s governing body, doubling down on their reasons for accepting the funds and warning him that if he made his concerns public he would be in breach of his fellowship. His pleas had fallen on deaf ears.
After Oxford and his flirtation with his father’s fascist movement, Max Mosley went on to become president of the FIA, the governing body for Formula One and other motorsports. But it was his bizarre sexual practices, disclosed by the News of the World, that would catapult Mosley into the limelight and make him the darling of wounded celebrities and even leading politicians, among them Tom Watson, once the Labour Party’s deputy leader.
Shortly after the phone hacking scandal began to envelope the News of the World (the tabloid would shut in 2011), Mosley became a champion of the tabloid’s many victims, financially underwriting the legal costs of claimants bringing phone hacking legal cases against Murdoch’s newspaper empire.
Mosley, through his tabloid crusade, made friends in the Labour Party as a result.
Mr Watson, Labour’s deputy leader who led the charge in the Commons against the excesses of the Murdoch press, declared: “I’m proud to call Max Mosley a friend and I’m delighted he has made a financial contribution to Labour.” In less than a year between June 2016 and February 2017, Mosley gave £500,000 in political donations to Mr Watson that followed £40,000 to support his successful bid to be deputy leader in 2015. At the same time that Mosley was funding Mr Watson, the family trust set up in his son’s name was making its first donation to Oxford – just over £1.1million to the St Peter’s College development fund, the payment for which is revealed in the charity’s 2017 accounts.
The bigger payment of £5million for the construction of the new student block followed.
For almost a decade, St Peter’s College was presided over by its master, Mark Damazer, 67, a stalwart of the BBC whose roles included editor of Newsnight and controller of Radio 4. Damazer stepped down from St Peter’s in 2019, but by then the negotiations for the endowment from the Mosley trust had been agreed and the deal done.
Max Mosley’s response to his son’s death at the age of 39 was to set up the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust, whose aim is to “support diverse charitable causes”.
The construction of Alexander Mosley House is one of the charity’s biggest funding projects. A decision was taken in secret earlier this year after Prof Goldman raised his complaint to change the name of the new student building so that it will not carry the Mosley family name after all.
But St Peter’s remains all too happy to take the money.