How orgy-loving Max Mosley is using his millions to seek vengeance on the Press
Behind this week’s plot to smear the Culture Secretary lies a tale of Left-wing zealots, a tinpot ‘watchdog’ (given £3m of YOUR cash) and a tycoon trying to muzzle those who exposed his sordid lifestyle
CONTAINED in a smart central London office suite above the celebrity nightspot Libertine, you will find the headquarters of an organisation called the Press Recognition Panel. You might not have heard of the Press Recognition Panel (PRP), but your pocket has already borne the burden of its existence. The PRP has £3 million of taxpayers’ money to spend over three years, half of it already gone with virtually nothing to show for it — unless you count its directors debating whether the staff ‘Christmas celebration’ dinner should be renamed as the more politically correct ‘seasonal end of year event’ (it was).
And it is the PRP’s failures — and the Government’s unwillingness to activate legislation designed to force newspapers into its State-sanctioned system of regulation — which lie behind this week’s smearing of Culture Secretary John Whittingdale by Hacked Off and its allies. The PRP describes itself as ‘the independent body set up . . . to ensure that regulators of the UK Press are independent, properly funded and able to protect the public’.
In order to become officially ‘recognised’ by the PRP, any potential Press regulator is supposed to satisfy 23 criteria. There is no limit to the number of regulators; the more the merrier, perhaps, because next year the PRP’s public funding ends and it will have to be able to support itself financially.
It will do this by charging those Press regulators it has formally recognised, in return for carrying out annual performance reviews.
But the PRP has a fundamental problem. So far, it has been unable to ‘recognise’ anybody.
That is because until recently no potential Press regulator had come forward to seek its benediction. The overwhelming majority of newspapers, magazines and news websites simply did not regard the PRP as an ‘independent body’, and did not want to sign up to what is seen as a lurch towards state censorship.
But now an applicant has come forward at last. It is called Impress. Even by the official yardstick, Impress would seem to have zero chance of becoming a Press regulator. It falls down on many counts, as we shall see; not least because it has failed to attract a single publication of any substance to regulate, nor even formulated a code of standards by which to do so.
Yet the PRP has made encouraging noises, and allowed more time for Impress to improve its application, which was heavily criticised when it was put out for consultation.
Impress now has until Wednesday next week to submit its revised bid — and it was one of Impress’s putative members, a website called Byline (partly funded by Hacked Off), which broke the story of Culture Secretary John Whittingdale’s former relationship with a so-called dominatrix.
But who is behind Impress? And why do they want to ‘regulate’ the UK Press?
This is the story of how a wellconnected Left-wing activist financed by a vengeful millionaire tycoon came to be on the verge of triggering the most punitive anti-Press laws enforced outside a dictatorship.
Ten years ago, Jonathan Heawood, founder and executive director of Impress, stood in the council elections of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
Mr Heawood’s ambition resembled a classic case of ‘more in hope than expectation’. He was a Labour Party candidate for the Holland ward, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in the world.
Not that the Cambridge and Harvard-educated Mr Heawood, 42, would feel so very out of place. The electoral roll suggests that he lived on a Thames-side Chelsea street where properties are valued today at more than £6 million.
His stepmother-in-law also happened to be queen of the bien pensant society; the hate-filled Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee.
Mr Heawood, once deputy literary editor at the Left-leaning Observer newspaper, came ninth of ten candidates; he would not be representing the interests of the very famous and the very wealthy, at least not for quite a long time to come.
But the following year, 2007, something occurred which would eventually bring that to pass: then Opposition leader David Cameron’s calamitous decision to appoint Andy Coulson as the Tory Party’s chief spin doctor.
Coulson had just stepped down as editor of the Rupert Murdochowned News of the World newspaper. Two of his staff had been jailed for phone hacking. In the circumstances, Coulson should not have been touched by the Tories with a bargepole (in time, he too would end up behind bars).
As it was, Coulson’s new job only encouraged further investigation of his newspaper’s phone-hacking, by those who felt antipathy for the Tories, Mr Murdoch and the conservative Press in general.
At the fore were the anti-Press pressure group Hacked Off. It was launched under the auspices of the Media Standards Trust, whose chairman Sir David Bell was a trustee of the ‘leadership training’ charity Common Purpose; described as ‘the Left’s equivalent of the Old Boys’ Network’.
Tom Watson, an ambitious Labour backbencher whose profile grew with every call for an inquiry into the Murdoch empire, was a founding member of Hacked Off’s ‘advisory committee’. Other highprofile Hacked Off supporters included the scandal-mired actor Hugh Grant, millionaire Harry Potter writer J.K. Rowling and the motor racing tycoon Max Mosley.
Mr Mosley, son of British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, had particular reason to resent the Press.
In 2008, the News of the World had exposed his participation in a sadomasochistic orgy with five prostitutes, which the paper claimed had Nazi overtones.
Mr Justice Eady eventually ruled in the High Court that the ‘bondage, beating and domination’ that took place had no Nazi connotations and Mosley had a right to privacy for his sexual activities, however unconventional. Mosley was awarded damages, but his desire for payback was unsatisfied.
He was a fighter, after all; he was once arrested during a brawl at one of his father’s rallies in a Jewish neighbourhood of London — in an extraordinary episode which we will explore in detail tomorrow.
Now, he wants much tougher Press restrictions; restrictions which the European Court of Human Rights has described as potentially ‘chilling’.
Andy Coulson resigned as No 10’s Director of Communications in January 2011. In the first week of July that year, the Guardian reported that Coulson’s News of the World had hacked Milly Dowler’s voicemail.
The Guardian also claimed — inaccurately as it turned out — that News of the World journalists had deleted voicemail messages, giving Milly’s parents false hope of her being still alive. This was the so-called ‘tipping point’ allegation.
Coulson was arrested on July 8, and five days later Cameron announced the Leveson Inquiry. Lord Justice Leveson’s subsequent recommendation of a new system of Press regulation with some kind of statutory backing was, however, rejected by the newspaper industry.
This impasse continued until a late-night meeting in the Westminster offices of the then Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband. Present were several Labour Party frontbenchers, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg (whose soon-to-beappointed communications adviser, Emma Gilpin-Jacobs, would later join the PRP and instigate the debate on what to call ‘Christmas dinner’), Tory Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin and no fewer than four lobbyists from Hacked Off.
But no one from the newspaper industry under discussion was in the room.
That night, a new system of Press regulation was agreed. It would be underpinned by a Royal Charter, approved by the Privy Council of senior MPs. And it would come armed with an unprecedentedly big stick with which to beat the Press — of all circulations
and political persuasions — into dutiful line.
Under a new ‘Crime and Courts Act’, punitive damages could be awarded in libel proceedings against any newspaper which was not a member of the regulator approved by the PRP. The message was ‘join us or be damned’.
Not only that, the Act also included a ‘costs provisions’ clause, under which a nonapproved newspaper could be ordered to pay the plaintiff’s costs in a libel action, even if it won its case, and no matter how wealthy the plaintiff, how large his costs or baseless his complaint.
The financial risks of criticising anyone in print would be enormous.
This clause is crucial to the Royal Charter zealots, who believe it will force newspapers into their system. But there are two problems — there has to be a PRP-approved regulator for newspapers to join, and the Culture Secretary, John Whittingdale, has to sign an order to activate the legal punishment for those who do not.
So far, he has not done so, and it is the fetid theory of Hacked Off and its allies that the reason he has not is fear of exposure of his defunct relationship with the ‘dominatrix’ Olivia King.
So they decided to do the job themselves. The story of Whittingdale and King was broken by Byline, a website that is part-funded by Hacked Off, and is one Impress’s micropublisher members.
As for the Royal Charter, the newspaper industry rejected it as gross State interference in free expression. Instead, it set up a new self-regulatory body called the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), by which the vast majority of publishers are now regulated. IPSO, it was made clear, would not seek recognition from the PRP.
This defiance was supported by journalists and free speech organisations around the world. They argued — as they do to this day — that the UK Government’s Royal Charter is a potent inducement for dictators around the world to oppress their own media. (Their views would surely be ‘if the Mother of Parliaments can do it, so can we’.)
In this ongoing arm-wrestle, November 2013 proved to be an important month. The Crime and Courts Act was passed in Parliament, while two obscure bodies also came into being. One was Mr Heawood’s Impress. The other was called the Independent Press Regulation Trust (IPRT).
At this point, readers might be forgiven for feeling they are drowning in an alphabet soup of acronyms. And, at the time, there was no apparent connection between Impress and the IPRT. The link would be revealed only later — but it was a profoundly significant one.
A clue to the motivating forces behind the IPRT appeared in the accounts of a charity called the Alexander Mosley Charitable Trust. This was set up by Max Mosley following the 2009 death by a suspected heroin overdose of his eldest son, Alexander. Max Mosley was the sole source of the trust’s £3.2 million income in 2013-14.
By the end of that financial year, the trust had pledged £30,000 to the IPRT. (By the end of 2014-15, that figure had risen to £400,000. In the same year, the Mosley Trust also gave £110,000 directly to Impress.)
Another Alexander Mosley trustee was Horatio Mortimer.
Mr Mortimer is a consultant with political lobbyist Sovereign Strategy. The firm was founded by Alan Donnelly, a former Labour MEP and head of the European Parliamentary Labour Party — who also worked with Max Mosley in the stewardship of the sport of Formula One.
In 2011, Hacked Off said that Mortimer had provided them with ‘administrative assistance’.
Impress had also begun to receive donations from a number of other sources. Some £40,000 came from the author J.K. Rowling, it was reported.
But Impress needed more money, and quickly.
Last September, the PRP announced it would begin to take applications from would-be Press regulators under the terms of the Royal Charter.
The milestone was marked by a Polly Toynbee article in which she attacked the Press’s self-regulating body, IPSO. What was needed, she wrote, was a ‘new regulator, genuinely independent . . . Impress is one organisation ready to apply to be that regulator’.
Ms Toynbee neglected to mention that she was not only one of Impress’s original financial backers, but the stepmother-inlaw of its founder. So much for transparency and independence.
Twitter traffic also suggested a mutual admiration between the ‘independent’ Impress and Hacked Off.
Priapic actor Hugh Grant, a Hacked Off director, retweeted an Impress initiative with the comment: ‘Important work by Impressive people.’
‘Thanks Hugh,’ came the simpering reply from the Impress Twitter feed.
Impress applied to the PRP for recognition as a Press regulator in January. Its credentials could now be properly scrutinised against the Royal Charter criteria.
The problem is that they simply
don’t stack up. The News Media Association — the body that represents national and local newspapers — says Impress fails on all but five of the 23 demands.
‘Criterion 5’, for example, stipulates that a regulator should have ‘sufficient number of people with experience of the industry’.
Until last June, Impress had but one board member with significant recent Press experience.
This was Sue Evison, who had been chief feature writer at the Sun. She resigned from Impress because she felt she was merely there as ‘a fig leaf’, and that other Impress board members were hostile to the popular Press.
She also felt that the rival IPSO was making progress. Jonathan Heawood told her she had ‘s*at upon’ Impress for publicly saying so, Ms Evison recalls.
Perhaps aware of the credibility gap left by her departure, Impress took on two new board members. One is Martin Hickman, a former Independent journalist.
Mr Hickman is also a friend of, and cheerleader for, the now Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, with whom he co-wrote the press-bashing book Dial M For Murdoch. (Mr Watson — who had to apologise for making unfounded sexual allegations against the late Tory minister Leon Brittan — had his Labour leadership campaign financed by Max Mosley and J.K. Rowling.)
The other Impress recruit was Emma Jones, a Sun columnist until she was sacked in 2003 by current News UK boss Rebekah Wade. Neither recruits seem to be wholly impartial ‘regulators’ of the Murdoch press at least.
So, not many experts. But that’s just the start.
According to the Royal Charter, ‘Regulator’ means an independent body formed by or on behalf of relevant publishers for the purpose of conducting regulatory activities in relation to their publications’.
The legal definition of ‘relevant publisher’ excludes businesses which have fewer than ten fulltime employees, or an annual turnover below £2 million.
None of the 2,600 or so titles produced by Britain’s established publishers have signed up to Impress. So who has? The answer is Your Thurrock (all the latest news from Thurrock and Grays), The Ferret, A Little Bit of Stone (described by its publisher as ‘something journalistic to do in my spare time’), the Port Talbot Magnet (‘staffed by volunteers’), and ten other titles, including the now notorious Byline.
Almost all are ‘hyper-local’ news websites or blogs run by one or two individuals on shoestring budgets and with minimal circulation; admirable ventures perhaps, but so tiny they surely do not qualify as ‘relevant’; neither legally nor in the context of determining the future freedom or otherwise of the industry as a whole.
Their attachment to Impress has the appearance of a fig leaf. Let us move on to finance.
The Charter further states that a regulator’s funding should be negotiated with the industry.
But the ‘Impress 14’ are so small they are expected to raise no more than £1,000 in annual subscription income to the regulator.
From the outside, it is unclear when Impress metamorphosed from being Mr Heawood’s pet project to Mr Mosley’s vehicle for revenge. There has been a consistent lack of transparency about the organisation’s funding.
Despite 40 boxes of supporting documents, the Impress application does not mention Max Mosley at all.
Instead it sets out how the mysterious IPRT has agreed to pay Impress almost £950,000 a year over four years.
It was only when later challenged at a public event that Impress chairman Walter Merricks confirmed that the Trust’s donation was ‘Mosley family’ money.
In other words, Mr Mosley holds the Impress purse strings.
The Mail has been told that Mr Mosley had wanted to fund Impress via his late son’s trust and the IPRT because it was ‘tax efficient’.
The arrangement is yet more precarious: Mr Mosley also has a ‘get-out’ clause.
If he were to lose faith in Impress’s activities, his financial backing could be withdrawn with just ten days’ notice. It is surely disingenuous for Impress to suggest that this will have no bearing on its modus operandi.
But it’s not only Impress which could be left dancing to Mr Mosley’s tune.
As the PRP will soon be selffunded through reviewing its own regulators, the likelihood is that it, too, will become financially dependent on the Mosley millions. Theoretically, the tycoon would then have the power to sink even the flagship of the Royal Charter, if he so chose.
Did the 14 Impress publications know that they were signing up to a Mosley-funded vehicle? Some seemed to believe that joining a Royal Charter-approved regulator is proof against any future legal costs.
If that is so, they will be alarmed to discover that Impress obliges them to join a compulsory arbitration scheme under which, according to industry critics, they could be made to pay legal costs — arbitrator’s fees under compensation adding up to £10,000 — to resolve complaints dealt with for free by the newspapers’ rival IPSO system.
Impress can raise its subscription charges at will, which it surely would have to do if Mr Mosley pulls its plug. So what does the PRP do now? It certainly faces an exquisite dilemma.
Should it fade away, having achieved nothing? Or, by agreeing, absurdly, that Impress is ‘independent and properly funded’, should it effectively consent to being bankrolled by Max Mosley, son of the man who was once Britain’s would-be fascist dictator, and whose own interest in Press regulation stems from the exposure of his paid-for sado-masochistic orgy?
When Mr Cameron launched his Royal Charter in the House of Commons, he quoted Winston Churchill: ‘A free Press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize, it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny.’
What advice would that great warrior for freedom give the Press Recognition Panel in its hour of need, one wonders.