Max Mosley

Max Mosley was born on 13 April 1940 in London, in the early years of the Second World War. His father was Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), and his mother was Diana Mitford, one of the Mitford sisters. In addition to his older full-brother Alexander, Mosley had five older half-siblings. On his father's side, they included the future novelist Nicholas Mosley, 3rd Baron Ravensdale (1923–2017). On his mother's side they were the merchant banker Jonathan Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne (born 1930), and the Irish preservationist Desmond Guinness (1931–2020). He was a nephew of Deborah Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, and first cousin of Peregrine Cavendish, 12th Duke of Devonshire. He was also third cousin of Winston Churchill MP, the grandson of the British prime minister, and fifth cousin of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.

A month after Max Mosley's birth, his father, who had campaigned for a negotiated peace between the British Empire and Nazi Germany, was interned by the incoming Churchill government under Defence Regulation 18B, along with other active fascists in Britain. His mother was imprisoned a month later. Max and his brother Alexander were not included in their parents' internment and, as a result, were separated from them for the first few years of their lives. In December 1940, Winston Churchill asked the Home Secretary Herbert Morrison to ensure Lady Mosley was able to see Max regularly.

Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley were released from detention at HMP Holloway on 16 November 1943, provoking widespread public protests. Their children were refused entry to several schools, due to a combination of their wildness and their parents' reputation, and were initially tutored at home instead. The family moved to a succession of country houses in England. Mosley's older half-brother Nicholas described the family, including Sir Oswald's children from his first marriage, spending the summer of 1945 getting the harvest in and shooting at Crowood Farm, near Ramsbury, Wiltshire.

At the age of 13, Mosley was sent to Stein an der Traun in Germany for two years, where he learned to speak fluent German. On his return to England, he spent a year at Millfield, an independent boarding school in Somerset, after which he continued his education in London for two years. He attended Christ Church, Oxford, graduating with a degree in physics in 1961. During his time there, he was secretary of the Oxford Union where his father spoke on two occasions, once with Jeremy Thorpe on the other side. In 1960, Mosley introduced his father to Robert Skidelsky, one of Mosley's contemporaries at the university, later a biographer of his father. Rejecting an early ambition to work as a physicist after "establishing that there was no money in it", Mosley studied law at Gray's Inn in London and qualified as a barrister in 1964. After a pupillage with Maurice Drake, he specialised in patent and trademark law. From 1961 to 1964, Mosley was a member of the Territorial Army, Parachute Regiment (44th Independent Parachute Brigade Group).

In 1950, the Mosleys bought houses in Ireland, and in Orsay, near Paris. They spent the year moving around Europe, spending the spring in France and the autumn and winter in Ireland, where Mosley was keen on riding and hunting. His aunt Nancy Mitford, in letters to Evelyn Waugh, recalled Sir Oswald and his family cruising the Mediterranean Sea on the family yacht. On one such trip they visited Spain and were entertained by Sir Oswald's friend General Franco.

Mosley, like many Formula One drivers, lived in Monaco. On 9 June 1960, he was married at the Chelsea Register Office to Jean Taylor, the daughter of James Taylor, a policeman from Streatham. In 1970, their first son, Alexander, was born, and in 1972 their second son, Patrick. On 5 May 2009, Alexander, a restaurateur, was found dead at his Notting Hill home by his cleaner. He had died of drug abuse at the age of 39. An inquest was held on 10 June 2009, the Westminster coroner declaring that his death was due to non-dependent drug abuse.

While Mosley was at university, his wife was given tickets to a motor race at the Silverstone Circuit. The circuit is not far from Oxford, and the couple went out of curiosity. Mosley was attracted by the sport, and once qualified as a barrister, began teaching law in the evenings to earn enough money to start racing cars himself. The sport's indifference to his background appealed to Mosley:

There was always a certain amount of trouble [being the son of Sir Oswald] until I came into motor racing. And in one of the first races I ever took part in there was a list of people when they put the practice times [...] and I heard somebody say, 'Mosley, Max Mosley, he must be some relation of Alf Mos[e]ley, the coachbuilder.' And I thought to myself, 'I've found a world where they don't know about Oswald Mosley.' And it has always been a bit like that in motor racing: nobody gives a damn.

At national level in the UK, Mosley competed in over 40 races in 1966 and 1967; he won 12 and set several class lap records. In 1968, he formed the London Racing Team in partnership with driver Chris Lambert to compete in European Formula Two, which at that time was the level of racing just below Formula One. Their cars were prepared by Frank Williams, later a Formula One team owner. It was a dangerous time to race: Mosley's first Formula Two race was the 1968 Deutschland Trophäe at Hockenheim in which double world champion Jim Clark was killed, and within two years both of Mosley's 1968 teammates, Piers Courage and Chris Lambert, were dead in racing accidents. Mosley's best result that year was an eighth place at a non-championship race at Monza. Engine builder Brian Hart says that as a driver, Mosley "might not have been particularly quick, but he was a thinking driver. He kept out of trouble and generally used his head."

From their teens to early twenties, Mosley and his brother were involved with their father's post-war party, the far-right Union Movement (UM), which advocated European nationalism. Trevor Grundy, a central figure in the UM's Youth Movement, writes of the 16-year-old Mosley painting the flash and circle symbol on walls in London on the night of the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary (4 November 1956). The flash and circle was used by both the UM and the pre-war British Union of Fascists (BUF). He also says Mosley organised a couple of large parties as a way "to get in with lively, ordinary, normal young people, girls as well as boys, and attract them to the Movement by showing that we were like them and didn't go on about Hitler and Mussolini, Franco and British Fascism all the time". Mosley met his future wife Jean at such a party. Mosley and Alexander were photographed posing as Teddy Boys in Notting Hill during the 1958 race riots between Afro-Caribbeans and local white gangs. The following year, they canvassed for their father when he ran as a Union Movement candidate for the nearby Kensington North seat in the 1959 general election.

Mosley rarely discussed his early political involvement with his father. When his father Oswald died, the London Daily Mail described him as a "much maligned and much misunderstood political giant of his era". Certainly, his father's political presence affected his early years, but Mosley reflected on this time, "I was born into this rather strange family and then at a certain point you get away from that." While he distanced himself from this period of his life, the "misunderstanding has remained and today... he carries that weight on his shoulders."

In a 1961 by-election, Mosley was an election agent for the Union Movement, supporting Walter Hesketh, the UM's parliamentary candidate for Manchester Moss Side. The motor racing journalist Alan Henry described him as one of his father's "right-hand men" at the time of a violent incident in 1962, in which Sir Oswald was knocked down by a mob in London and saved from serious injury by his son's intervention. As a result of his involvement in this fracas, Mosley was arrested and charged with threatening behaviour. He was later cleared at Old Street Magistrates' Court on the grounds that he was trying to protect his father. By 1964, when he began work as a barrister, Mosley was no longer involved in politics.

In the early 1980s, Mosley attempted a political career, working for the Conservative Party and hoping to become a parliamentary candidate. Bernie Ecclestone's biographer, Terry Lovell, wrote that he gave up this aspiration after being unimpressed by "the calibre of senior party officials". He also believed his name would be a handicap and later said, "If I had a completely open choice in my life, I would have chosen party politics, but because of my name, that's impossible". By the late 1990s, he had become a donor to the Labour Party and a supporter of the government of Tony Blair. In 2018, Labour decided not to accept further donations from Mosley following accusations that he published a leaflet in the 1960s linking immigrants with disease. Mosley had already donated £500,000 to the office of deputy leader Tom Watson.

In 2008, Mosley won a court case (Mosley v News Group Newspapers) against the News of the World newspaper—which had reported his involvement in what it said was a Nazi-themed sex act involving five women—on the grounds that it had breached his privacy. Justice Eady ruled that, despite one of the attendees wearing a military uniform, there were no Nazi connotations to the orgy. As a result, in 2009 Mosley brought a case (Mosley v United Kingdom) against the UK's privacy laws in the European Court of Human Rights, in a bid to force newspapers to warn people before exposing their private lives so they could have the opportunity to seek a court injunction. The case was rejected by the court on 10 May 2011 as they argued that a "pre-notification requirement would inevitably affect political reporting and serious journalism."

In July 2011, The Daily Telegraph reported that Mosley was financially guaranteeing the court costs of claimants who may have been subjected to phone hacking by the News of the World. Mosley refused to comment at the time, but he later gave a television interview to the BBC and a telephone interview to Reuters where he confirmed the story.

Mosley launched legal action against Google, in an attempt to stop searches from returning web pages which use the photographs from the video used for the News of the World story. On 6 November 2013, in Mosley v SARL Google, a French court sided with Mosley and ordered Google to prevent its search engine from providing links to images of Mosley engaging in sexual activities from the video. The Register suggested the ruling would lead to a Streisand effect, increasing interest in the images, which are still findable through other search engines. At the Leveson Inquiry, Mosley stated his reasons for pursuing Google:

the fundamental point is that Google could stop this material appearing but they don't, or they won't as a matter of principle. My position is that if the search engines – if somebody were to stop the search engines producing the material, the actual sites don't really matter because without a search engine, nobody will find it, it would just be a few friends of the person who posts it. The really dangerous things are the search engines.

Mosley launched similar legal action against Google in Germany. In January 2014, the German court also ruled against the American company. In giving its verdict, the court stated, "that the banned pictures of the plaintiff severely violate his private sphere."

In an interview with Der Spiegel following the judgement, Mosley said: "Strictly speaking Google has got to obey German courts in Germany and French courts in France. But in the end it has to decide whether it wants to live in a democracy. Google behaves like an adolescent rebelling against the establishment. The company has to recognise that it is a part of society and it must accept the responsibility which comes with that." Mosley then launched proceedings against Google in the UK. All the cases were eventually settled in May 2015.

In late February 2018, the Daily Mail reported that Mosley had published a leaflet in the early 1960s linking black immigration to the spread of diseases, the implication being that Mosley had committed perjury in the High Court when giving evidence in his libel case against the News of the World. In an interview with Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News, he conceded that a passage in the leaflet "probably is racist", which he denied ever publishing, and rejected the accusation he had lied in court. The following day, the Labour Party said it would not accept any further donations from Mosley, including further support for the office of deputy leader Tom Watson; Mosley had donated £500,000 in total to Watson's office. Asked what he would do about the Daily Mail's publication of its article, Mosley said what happened next was, "entirely in the hands of my lawyers".

In December 2020, it was announced that the High Court had rejected Mosley's legal action against the publisher of the Daily Mail for sending a dossier which suggested that he had lied under oath to prosecutors. Justice Matthew Nicklin wrote that "The claimant's pleaded claim discloses no reasonable grounds for bringing his claim for malicious prosecution." In fact, no prosecution had taken place.