Max Mosley: the far-right past of a millionaire activist

“Some find the timing of the Mail’s exposé – just before the second part of Leveson was scrapped – ‘unsettling’”

“It is rare for a dusty old document, fished out of a provincial archive, to become national news,” said David Olusoga in The Observer. But that is what happened last week, when the Daily Mail produced the results of its lengthy investigation into the dark past of the former FIA president Max Mosley. As part of an exposé that ran across more than 20 pages over consecutive days, the paper described how, as a young man, Max Mosley was closely involved with the Union Movement (UM), a far-right party founded after the War by his father, the fascist “Blackshirt” leader, Sir Oswald Mosley. Among other things, the UM was “hysterically opposed” to the immigration of black and brown people from the Commonwealth, and for a byelection in Manchester’s Moss Side in 1961, it produced a campaign leaflet promising to stop immigration, claiming that “coloured immigrants” spread disease. “Inconveniently”, this highly racist leaflet – unearthed in a Manchester archive by Daily Mail hacks – names as its publisher one Max Mosley.

Why is all this important? Well, for one thing, said Sarah Baxter in The Sunday Times, Mosley claimed under oath, in a privacy case against the News of the World in 2008, that he knew nothing about this leaflet (which lawyers for the now-defunct tabloid had seen reference to, but had not been able to find). Faced with a possible perjury suit, he says that he has no recollection of it. He insists he has never been a racist and says that, in any case, he has a right to change his views over 60 years. Yet in an interview last week, he told The Guardian that the leaflet’s inflammatory claims might be “true”, and that it was “perfectly legitimate to offer immigrants financial inducements to go home”. And if the leaflet wasn’t enough, the Mail produced a heap of other evidence of Mosley’s far-right past: they found a photograph of him taken in Notting Hill during the 1958 race riots, with what looks like a cut on his knuckle; and a witness who claims that in 1962, Mosley Jr visited the Nazi death camp at Dachau, while en route to join his father at a neo-fascist knees-up at a hotel in Venice attended by former Waffen-ss officers.

Youthful indiscretions, committed by the son of a domineering father? Possibly, said the Daily Mail. But Mosley was not a child. By 1962, he had graduated from Oxford, where he’d outraged fellow students by calling for racial segregation across Africa. Moreover, after going into motor racing, he made vast sums of money by doing business in apartheid-era South Africa, while other sporting organisations were boycotting the regime. But Mosley is not just a multimillionaire businessman. He is a trained lawyer, with a long-standing interest in politics, who knows that money buys influence. He has given £540,000 to his friend Tom Watson, deputy leader of the Labour Party (money Watson has refused to return, although his party has said it won’t accept any further donations from Mosley). A bitter critic of the media, Watson has vowed tighter press regulation if Labour comes to power (but in 2012, he used parliamentary privilege to air unsubstantiated claims about a VIP paedophile wing at Westminster). Mosley also funds – indirectly, via a trust – the “press-hating” press regulator Impress. “It is fair to say that Max Mosley and the Daily Mail are not the best of chums,” said Will Gore in The Independent. Mosley has a “deep-seated” antagonism towards sections of the British press. He brought his successful privacy suit against The News of the World after it reported that he had taken part in a sadomasochistic orgy. Since then, his family trust has given nearly £4m to Impress ( see page 29); more recently, his lawyers have been trying to force newspapers to remove from their archives stories about the orgy, and to stop any new reports about it. So it is easy to see Mosley as the victim of a politically motivated attack by powerful newspapers, desperate to discredit him and so undermine Impress (the only regulator to have been state-sanctioned as independent by the Press Recognition Panel, which has the potential to make it quite powerful). But that does not necessarily invalidate the Mail’s reporting: the revelations about Mosley’s past are deeply concerning. Nor should only right-wingers worry about the idea of the press being regulated by a body that is linked to the state.

Still, some find the timing of the Mail’s exposé – just before the Government announced the scrapping of the second part of the Leveson Inquiry – “unsettling”, said Jamie Doward in The Observer. The Government claims the “world” has so changed that the Inquiry, into the relations between journalists and the police, is no longer necessary. Others see it as a sign of a weak government’s desperation to keep the press onside. The world may have changed, but the balance of power seems the same.