It is a matter of public record that in 2007 Max Mosley, the son of the British fascist Oswald Mosley and his posh, Hitler-loving wife Diana, did not enjoy what the News of the World called a “sick Nazi orgy with five hookers.” As the ruling in Mosley v. News Group Newspapers Ltd. (2008) confirms, Mr. Mosley merely rented an apartment for the day and hired five prostitutes for the purposes of an orgy sick even by the standards of Tony Blair’s Britain. Mr. Mosley certainly enjoyed himself; the video that the News of the World ran on its website showed that much, and much more. It was only the Nazi part that was untrue.
At the time, Max Mosley was the president of the Fédération Inter-nationale du Sport Automobile (FISA), which runs Formula One motor racing. In its effort to justify its intrusion as being in the public interest, the News of the World exaggerated somewhat. The women, pretending to be prison guards, had inspected Mosley’s hair for lice, but they had not shaved his head. They had only shaved his buttocks, preparatory to caning them.
Shortcomings were also exposed in the costume department. The prison-style uniforms had horizontal stripes, not the vertical ones of German concentration camp inmates. One of the dominatrixes had been wearing not a “Nazi uniform,” as the News of the World had claimed, but a uniform of the postwar Luftwaffe; same color, no swastikas. The same woman had been caught on tape calling another participant “schwarze” while she whipped her. But, Mosley’s lawyer explained, she had used it in its non-racist colloquial sense of “brunette.” He also insisted that his client, who wears hearing aids, had not heard the Luftwaffe dominatrix shout, “Aryans rule!” Anyone who frequents S&M dungeons with a problematic hearing aid can probably sympathize.
In the learned opinion of Justice David Eady, it was Mosley’s right as a free-born Englishman to pay women to flog him until his buttocks bled and then to keep it secret. Eady gave the News of the World a spanking and awarded Mosley 60,000 pounds in damages. Since beating the News of the World in court, Mosley has used his considerable personal fortune to campaign for limiting the freedom of the press, and not just in Britain.
The exuberance of the British tabloids is notorious, and their readers’ appetite for smut is insatiable. In the 1990s and 2000s, the tabloids behaved so shamefully that they endangered the freedom of the press. News of the World staff were alleged to have hacked the voicemails of 9/11 victims and to have commissioned the hacking of the voicemails of a murdered teenager named Milly Dowler. They certainly hacked the messages of the royal family; in 2007, a News of the World journalist was jailed for doing exactly that.
In 2011, the David Cameron government launched a public inquiry under Lord Justice Brian Leveson into press ethics. Max Mosley was among those who testified. When the Leveson inquiry reported in 2012, its recommendations included replacing the self-regulating Press Complaints Commission with a government-funded Press Recognition Panel (PRP). Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the News of the World’s parent company, closed the paper.
The newspapers did their best not to comply with Leveson, and the Cameron government rapidly lost its interest in forcing their compliance. Press regulation in Britain remains in limbo and the press on probation; Leveson’s recommendation that newspapers be liable for both sides’ costs if a complaint goes to court, regardless of who wins, has yet to become law. The PRP does not recognize the industry’s replacement for the Press Complaints Commission, the Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO), and the major newspapers have chosen to regulate themselves individually rather than submit to IPSO.
The government’s PRP has meanwhile recognized a second regulator, IMPRESS, even though no major newspaper is a member. IMPRESS, which now carries a quasi-governmental power to criticize the press, is funded by former victims of press intrusion, including Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling. Its biggest donor is the fun-loving ex-Führer of Formula One himself, Max Mosley.
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At the time of IMPRESS’s receipt of a royal charter in 2016, Mosley had donated more than $5 million to the regulator, via two charitable trusts. These donations are only part of Mosley’s campaign for what he calls privacy.
In 2011, Mosley tried to persuade the European Court of Human Rights that newspapers should be forced to warn people before exposing their private lives, regardless of whether the public interest is at stake. In what the Telegraph called “a significant victory for free speech,” the court ruled against Mosley.
In 2013 and 2014, Mosley won cases in French and German courts against Google. Aligning his campaign to cover his shameful past with growing public concern over online privacy, he secured verdicts that banned Google from giving French and German Internet users links to images from the News of the World’s 2008 exposé. In 2015, following the launch of a case against Google in a British court, Mosley and Google reached a secret, out-of-court agreement.
In 2016, the year in which his generosity to IMPRESS helped to secure quasi-governmental approval from the Press Recognition Panel, Mosley donated a further 500,000 pounds to Tom Watson, a member of Parliament and deputy leader of the Labour party. This was one of the largest donations to a single politician in British history. Mosley has donated to the Labour party since the 1990s. Perhaps Mosley was feeling especially socialist in 2016, though not, of course, even slightly national-socialist. It is hard for us to know what Mosley really feels. And by ceaselessly campaigning to restrict the freedom of the press, Mosley would like to make it even harder for us to know.
Last month the Daily Mail published evidence suggesting that Mosley perjured himself in his testimony against the News of the World. In court, Mosley had admitted having served as campaign manager for a candidate of his father’s racist Union Movement in a 1961 by-election in Manchester. He had testified, however, that it was “absolute nonsense” to suggest he had published leaflets claiming that nonwhite immigrants carried disease and that voters should “send blacks home.”
The racist leaflet reprinted by the Mail carried the words “published by Max Mosley.” Mosley threatened legal action and insisted that he had disavowed his father’s fascism in 1963. The Mail replied by publishing a photograph of Mosley at his father’s last major public speech in 1965 and reminded readers of Formula One’s collaboration with the apartheid government of South Africa.
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The Labour party, under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, is proving itself a tolerant group when it comes to the ideological crotchets of its backers. Tom Watson has refused to refund any of Mosley’s generous donation. Watson has further praised Mosley as a defender of “the weak against the strong.” Walter Merricks, the chairman of IMPRESS, has stood by his patron too. But senior Labour sources have said that the party will accept no further donations from Mosley, whose most recent donation was in 2017. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police are assessing the Mail’s claims on behalf of the Crown Prosecution Service, and News International, the parent company of the defunct News of the World, has instructed its lawyers “to consider . . . all our options.”
Mosley’s discomfort displaced from the front pages allegations about the shameful past of Jeremy Corbyn himself. Jan Sarkocy, who was a “diplomat” in Czechoslovakia’s London embassy in the 1980s until his expulsion as a spy, has claimed that Corbyn and other hard-left Labour politicians socialized regularly with staff members of Warsaw Pact embassies in London in those days. Sarkocy also claims that he recruited Corbyn as an “asset,” and he paid him 10,000 pounds.
Corbyn derided these claims as “ridiculous smears.” He threatened that a Corbyn government would impose the sort of press restraints that Max Mosley would appreciate: “We’ve got news for them, change is coming.”
Given what happened next, you can understand why Corbyn might appreciate the kind of scrubbing of the Internet that Mosley secured from Google. Last week, it emerged that in the year before he became Labour leader in 2015, Corbyn had been an active member of a private Facebook group called Palestine Live. Topics of discussion included Holocaust denial, purported Zionist control of the BBC, Israel’s supposed involvement in the 9/11 and 2015 Paris attacks, and conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds. Several Labour party members were active participants in the group, and Corbyn’s son was a non-contributing member.
So Max Mosley, who is Tom Watson’s biggest donor, wants to see press freedom reduced and the Internet subject to retroactive censorship. And Jeremy Corbyn, who is Tom Watson’s party leader, promises to reduce the freedom of the press should he enter 10 Downing Street. If he does, IMPRESS will be on hand to advise on what should and should not be published.
If the British press were already regulated as Mosley and Corbyn want, Mosley would have been able to stop the Mail from publishing evidence that he had at the very least misspoken under oath in 2008. The Palestine Live group would have been able to continue its secret propagation of racist conspiracy theories in the Labour party. And Corbyn would have been able to prevent the airing of highly plausible allegations of Cold War fellow-traveling. All this in the name of privacy. Yet in all three cases, publication served a clear public interest.
The company that the leaders of Britain’s opposition party keep and the shared hostility towards a free press that unites Mosley the secretive millionaire with Corbyn the Trotskyite authoritarian may explain Mosley’s reply when Sky TV’s Adam Boulton asked him about his politics.
“Are you still a fascist?”
“No, I’m a member of the Labour party.”
Dominic Green is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
