Discuss the sport you love with other motorsport fans
why can't you just take your massive fortune and buy a yacht and go live in some sunny corner of the world and not talk to the media, or anyone else.
ten out of ten. Just a shame he bought those votes at the extraordinary voting meeting.whoever exposed this git
They had no right attempting to interfere with F1 in that way. What they did was illegal and served nobody's interests but their own. It was far more disgusting than anything Max has done.whoever exposed this git
I'd well buy his biography
whoever exposed this git
We have every right to know the weaknesses of people in power and in public office who are making moral judgements over others. Freedom of speech has been damaged.
I'd well buy his biography
It would be censored!!
whoever exposed this git
We have every right to know the weaknesses of people in power and in public office who are making moral judgements over others. Freedom of speech has been damaged.
People who want to influence powerful institutions should not be allowed to bribe secret service officers to illegally obtain video evidence of a private event with the aim of using the evidence to publicly ruin a particular individual in order to gain influence over said institution. Free speech has nothing to do with it. You are assuming that the press is an instrument through which the population is given access to important information presented without bias and through which people are at a basic level, able to access the truth. In the case of News International's publications and nearly all of the UK newspapers, this is not the case.
whoever exposed this git
We have every right to know the weaknesses of people in power and in public office who are making moral judgements over others. Freedom of speech has been damaged.
People who want to influence powerful institutions should not be allowed to bribe secret service officers to illegally obtain video evidence of a private event with the aim of using the evidence to publicly ruin a particular individual in order to gain influence over said institution. Free speech has nothing to do with it. You are assuming that the press is an instrument through which the population is given access to important information presented without bias and through which people are at a basic level, able to access the truth. In the case of News International's publications and nearly all of the UK newspapers, this is not the case.
Mosely is great in your eyes????????? 
:yikes: Mosely is great in your eyes?????????
Max Mosley is slightly deaf in one ear, so every so often, as we sit in his office six floors above Monaco, he leans forward, taps his ear, and says, “What? What?” and I have to repeat, louder — and there are two secretaries just next door — questions such as, when did you first get into sadomasochism? Was your father, the fascist leader Oswald Mosley, into sadomasochism too? Do you have a safe word, and if you do, what is it?
For the last one, he makes a strange noise and stares at my shoes, which happen to be 6in stilettos.
“Well,” he says, eyes casing the room. “With the right sort of people, you don’t need one. It’s all quite mild. It was made to sound a lot more in the video: all action. And then of course I was laughed at because in one of the main breaks I had a cup of tea, a . . .” A pit stop? I say. The president of motor sport’s regulatory body, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, laughs. “Yes. Ha ha ha. The girls were all having white wine.”
I have to admit I didn’t expect Mosley to be this jolly. Dry, yes. Menacing, perhaps. Lisping, possibly. But jolly? He doesn’t quite offer me a cup of tea as he ushers me into his lair but, in a plain white shirt and navy slacks, the tightly coiled 69-year-old is full of disarming pleasantries: “It’s awfully good of you to come . . .” and “How tremendous . . .”
I am here to discuss “the effects of motor sport on the environment and how he feels about stepping down as the FIA president” but it’s only about five minutes before we get on to his private life, which became considerably less private 18 months ago when his participation in a five-hour sadistic umpalumpa session in Chelsea hit the tabloid front pages.
I sense that he rather relishes discussing his tastes, although he does say, as he sits down on a small, rigid chair, legs akimbo, that, “I don’t like talking about it and I don’t like putting it all in the papers again but I’m damned if I’m going to be intimidated.”
Anyway, there’s a distinct touch on the gas when I ask him when he first got into it all. “From the age of four,” he says. “I was fascinated by it: any newspaper, magazine, or book I would read.”
Four? That’s some version of Noddy and Big-Ears. He shrugs. “I am simply hardwired. There used to be a theory that it’s because of things that happened during your childhood, but in my case nobody hit me as a child, ever. I even got through English school for a year without getting hit — which in the 1950s was quite something.”
Still, he had a pretty unusual upbringing as the younger son of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British fascists. I don’t think he saw much of his mother, Diana — the most beautiful of the Mitford sisters — or particularly liked her: “She was quite capable of the snide remark.” Besides, she preferred his older brother, Alex. Fortunately his father favoured him. “He was great, actually,” he says. “I was very sporty — I loved riding and would do very unwise things on horses and he liked that.”
Diana and Oswald’s opinions differed not only about their son but also about Adolf Hitler, guest of honour at their wedding. “My father met him twice in his life and didn’t really like him,” says Mosley. “My mother knew him well and liked him. She appreciated him at a dinner party sort of level. He obviously had great charm. You don’t get into that position without something.”
Mosley was expelled from his German boarding school but, at 16, he determined to get into Oxford and eventually he did, marrying Jean, a policeman’s daughter, in his second year there.
“In those days society didn’t really like people being together who weren’t married,” he says. He tried a bit of light domination with her: “You sort of feel the territory slightly very early in a relationship and if there’s no response you back off,” he says. And so it was all a secret — “I didn’t even tell a doctor” — for 50 years until someone sold the story to the News of the World.
He promptly sued for invasion of privacy and won, in a case that has had immense repercussions across the legal world.
What did his wife say? He exhales. “It’s sort of sad,” he says. Well, is she all right about it? “Yeah ... She’s okay about it. We’ve been together 50 years. That doesn’t change.”
Anyway, this summer, there was a still greater sadness. The oldest of his two sons, Alexander, a 39-year-old restaurateur, died of an overdose. Mosley feels he was a poor father to the children when growing up — “absent and preoccupied” — and was clearly knocked sideways by the death: “Oh, there is no dealing with it. Especially with a son. You don’t. You can’t. It’s just a terrible, unnatural thing.”
Did he know it was coming? “He was depressed,” he says. “Drugs were the only thing that stopped the depression. He saw every psychiatrist. I think all of us have suffered some degree from depression — I have, but I can kind of manage it — so we’ve got some idea of what [the search for a cure] is like.”
Since the tabloid scandal, Mosley has become curiously famous. “Actually it’s very annoying because people do recognise me,” he says. “I get a great sense of sympathy.” His colleagues in the world of sport are “allowed three jokes”, he says. He wants to write a book about his life but when I ask him what his greatest vice (ho ho) is, he says “laziness”, so it might have to wait.
Besides, I wonder whether he’s going to drop the racing world quite so readily. He has been president of the FIA since 1993, and 10 days ago sent a meddling letter campaigning for his favoured candidate as successor, Jean Todt. Why is he so keen on Todt rather than the self-proclaimed “candidate for change” Ari Vatanen? “He’s a brilliant manager,” he says.
No particular reason he’s so keen on his appointed man? No skeletons in the closet? “No, no,” he smiles, cobra-like. “We’ve all tried very hard to get it right.” Well, does he feel the public face of Formula One has been tarnished, what with the crashfixing and all? “No,” he says.
Oh, come on! I say. “All top professional sport has difficulties,” he says. “Sometimes you get criticised. But as long as I’m satisfied in my own mind that we’ve got it right, I’m okay.”
He’ll hand over the keys next June and that is that, right? “They’ve got this theory that I’m going to be this malevolent presence behind the scenes,” he says. “That’s absolutely not true. I would never call anyone and say I think you should do such and such — if somebody calls me and says, “What do you think?” I’ll tell them but I’m not going to interfere.”
He’ll have to content himself with rattling between his farmhouse in Provence, and Chelsea, and taking his battle to beef up the privacy laws to Strasbourg, but if Mosley wants to meddle, he will meddle. He may be charming but something tells me that crossing him might be a bad idea. Which makes me wonder, suddenly, what he will do if he doesn’t like this article. He smirks. “If I don’t like the article, I’ll ring you up and I’ll say I think I should spank you, and if you say that sounds like a lovely idea then we’ll arrange it.”
Okay, I say. See you in Chelsea? “Yes, I’ll arrange two young ladies for us,” he says. “You’re blushing.” Too bloody right I am, I laugh, and run for my life.
- By darwin daliYeah, not very active here, unfortunately. Is it […]
See our F1 related articles too!
