ARROGANT, aloof and confrontational, Max Mosley has never suffered from a shortage of enemies. Not that he cares. "I don't mind flak. I come from a family where we have had flak all our lives," he once said. "I love reading the blogs when they are being furious about me. It's very entertaining." Yet even for the famously abrasive 67-year-old head of motor sport's governing body, his current travails are no laughing matter.
The testosterone-fuelled world of Formula One is famously tolerant of its members' sexual peccadilloes. It's a macho milieu where a tabloid sting that captures one of the boys spanking five hookers with a paddle in a Chelsea bondage dungeon during a
five-hour orgy would usually be more likely to produce schoolboy smirks than censure.
"If Max was in bed with two hookers, they'd say 'Good for you'," said motorsport billionaire Bernie Ecclestone. "But people find this repulsive." The "this" in question being S&M sessions with prostitutes while speaking German. The combination is beyond the pale. Especially when your last name is synonymous with pre-war fascism and post-war racism.
Mosley is the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, the British Union of Fascists leader whose wedding to Max's mother Diana Mitford was attended by Adolf Hitler. His father was so committed to accommodating Nazi Germany that at the height of the war he loudly advocated a negotiated peace.
These blue-blooded scions of the Mitford family, when not cruising in their yacht or spending time in Spain with their old friend General Franco, spent the post-war years shuttling between homes in Ireland and Paris. Dispatched to schools in Germany and Paris where he became fluent in French and German, Max ended up studying physics at Christ Church College, Oxford.
While there he proved himself a chip off the old block. As president of the Oxford Union in 1961, he campaigned on a platform of "free speech for fascists" when an invitation for his father to address the Union was opposed. That year Mosley canvassed for his father's violent, right-wing Union Movement in Manchester.
As Robert J Taylor, a former branch chairman of the UM, which campaigned to repatriate blacks, said: "Max was very much a Mosleyite, one of the boys." So involved was Mosley that in 1962 he found himself in court charged with threatening behaviour after punching anti-fascist demonstrators at a meeting in London. He was acquitted when he told the court he could "not be expected to stand idly by" as his father was jostled and pushed.
Although his preference was for a life in politics (he applied to stand as a Conservative candidate in the 1980s), he quickly realised that would be impossible "with my name". Indeed, he has spent the past half a century denying colluding with his father, trying to dodge the shadow cast by his family's Blackshirt politics.
Given the circumstances, it is difficult to imagine any more damaging allegations than those that he paid £2,500 for a sadomasochistic orgy with five prostitutes wearing Nazi-style garb and striped pyjamas reminiscent of the Holocaust death camps. Which is why Mosley – who acknowledges that the exposé of his sexual antics is "embarrassing" but denies any Nazi connotations – says he will sue for invasion of privacy.
Motorsport was supposed to be Mosley's refuge from the shackles of his family history. In the mid-1960s his wife Jean, who he met through the Union Movement and married aged 21, took the successful young barrister to Silverstone. He was smitten: he loved to race and no one gave him grief for being a Mosley. He discovered that "in motor racing, nobody gives a darn (that I'm Oswald Mosley's son]".
Mosley threw himself into his burgeoning career as a trademark lawyer specialising in motorsport, combining his twin passions in the early 1970s by becoming one of four co-founders of the March racing team, dealing with the legal and commercial duties. The team wasn't a success in Formula One, but made a fortune selling racing cars to smaller teams around the world. Already rich thanks to his family's wealth, when the team was sold in 1977 he became financially independent.
That allowed him to become involved in the sport's politics, where he forged a close relationship with Bernie Ecclestone. The savvy little entrepreneur and the patrician toff became an inseparable double act, and as Ecclestone's star rose, so did Mosley's. When he negotiated the Concorde agreement that stopped the savage political infighting of the early 1980s, he became one of the biggest beasts in the sport. When his subtle behind-the-scenes campaigning saw him unseat bombastic Frenchman Jean-Marie Balestre from the presidency of Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile (FISA) in 1991, he became F1's second most powerful man after Ecclestone.
Mosley is formidably single-minded and hard-working, and once in place he pursued his pet projects with incredible energy, passion and a remarkable attention to detail. A major preoccupation was safety: he was in the same race at Hockenheim when Jim Clark crashed; by the end of that year three of the 21 drivers who started that race would be dead.
But if Mosley was persuasive and charming to the sport's power-brokers, he also displayed a bluntness and lacerating self-assurance in his dealings with those he considered less important than himself. Which meant most of the paddock.
Anyone who questioned his judgment got both barrels. "I react badly to being pushed around," he said. "It's not in my nature to accept it." Last year, responding to a call for his resignation from Sir Jackie Stewart, he said: "Dear old Jackie, he knows nothing about sports governance. Because he never stops talking, he doesn't know much about anything, actually."
Mosley reserves his most intense loathing for McLaren's Ron Dennis. It is a mutual dislike that became painfully public last year when McLaren became embroiled in a spying scandal and Mosley used it as a stick to beat him.
Within the sport, mutters that he should resign his unpaid position have become more audible. Not that Mosley seems concerned. "There are times when I'm utterly fed up. The other day I was reading a book called The Wisdom Of Crowds and it got me thinking: if all these thousands of people keep saying I'm a tosser, maybe they're actually right?"
This week, as his invitation to Bahrain for the Grand Prix was rescinded by royal decree and Mercedes, BMW, Honda, Toyota plus a growing number of the membership of the International Automobile Federation (FIA) told him it's time to go, it appears he may not be the only one to have reached that conclusion.
You've been Googled• Mosley drove for Frank Williams' F2 team after Chris Lambert the driver with whom Mosley had founded the London Racing Team, was killed at Zandvoort in July 1968.
• Mosley is seriously posh: his older brother and five older half-siblings include the novelist Nicholas Mosley, 3rd Baron Ravensdale, above, and the writer, Jonathan Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne.
• Mosley was a member of the Territorial Army during the early Sixties, training as a parachutist. This training led some national English newspapers to link him to the French right wing Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS), which was involved in the Algerian War at that time.
• Mosley has championed making F1 more "green" through a 10-year freeze on engine development and by bringing in KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System).
• In recognition of his contribution to road safety and motorsport France made Mosley a Chevalier dans l'Ordre de la Légion d'Honneur in 2006.
The full article contains 1290 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
