Mosley faces police investigation over ‘racist’ leaflet
MAX MOSLEY is facing a perjury investigation, it emerged last night, as Labour was urged to hand back the £540,000 he has donated to the party.
Scotland Yard confirmed it was assessing a dossier detailing Mr Mosley’s links to a racist pamphlet handed to investigators by the Crown Prosecution Service. A decade ago Mr Mosley told the High Court that he had no recollection of the leaflet and dismissed as “absolute nonsense” reports that it claimed “coloured immigrants” spread disease.
Last night he maintained he did not recognise the document, which names him as its publisher, and said any suggestion that he lied under oath was “obviously nonsense”.
After the document emerged, the Labour Party, whose deputy leader Tom Watson received £540,000 from Mr Mosley, said it would no longer accept his donations. Mr Mosley had said in an interview on Tuesday that he would continue to make payments.
While insisting that the comments were made “a long time ago” and people “obviously change their views”, a spokesman for Jeremy Corbyn described the contents of the leaflet as “utterly repugnant”.
The spokesman continued: “I don’t believe there will be any more payments to the Labour Party or Tom Watson from Max Mosley.” Labour said it had moved away from “large payments from wealthy donors” and would only accept future payments if they were “appropriate” and “ethical”.
But pressure was growing on the party to go further and return the money they had already accepted from the millionaire privacy campaigner and son of Oswald Mosley, the fascist.
James Cleverly, the Conservative Party deputy chairman, told the London Evening Standard: “Tom Watson should seriously consider distancing himself from Mr Mosley and returning the money.”
Mr Mosley’s links to Impress, the only state recognised press regulator, and “some of our leading politicians”, were raised with Theresa May, who vowed that the freedom of the press
“will never change” while she is Prime Minister. She said: “I absolutely agree that a free press is very important, it underpins our democracy... whatever they say about us, whatever they write about us, it is important that they are able to hold politicians to account.”
In 1961 Mr Mosley acted as election agent for Walter Hesketh, the candidate for his father’s far-right Union Movement, in a by-election in Moss Side, Manchester.
As part of the campaign a leaflet, which stated its publisher was Mr Mosley, made the claims about immigrants, adding: “Protect your health, there is no medical check on immigration; tuberculosis, VD and other terrible diseases are on the increase. Coloured immigration threatens your children’s health.”
During his privacy trial against the News of the World in 2008, in which a judge ruled that a sadomasochistic orgy with five prostitutes was not Nazithemed, Mr Mosley said he had no recollection of the document, challenging the QC: “If there were such a leaflet you would produce it.”
This week, documents were unearthed by the Daily Mail in a local archive. The paper passed them to the CPS. A spokesman said: “Information received from the Mail has been passed to the Metropolitan Police.” The Met said: “The CPS forwarded information from the Daily Mail to the Met Police. An assessment will be carried out.”
Mr Mosley says the revelations were timed to distract from his attempt to force newspapers including the Daily Mail to remove historic articles about him using the Data Protection Act.
“Nevertheless, I knew that if the News of the World thought the leaflet relevant, they would have disclosed it…. The fact that they didn’t reinforced my view that no such leaflet existed. The suggestion that I lied in court is obviously nonsense. Now that I’ve seen copies of this leaflet, I still do not recognise it. It is not something I would have ever wished to be associated with. It is offensive and divisive,” he said.