Did F1 tycoon Max Mosley lie to orgy trial?

A major investigation by the Mail today reveals the racist and thuggish past of ex-Formula One boss Max Mosley.

And we ask whether the tycoon, who has handed more than £500,000 to Labour Party deputy leader Tom Watson, lied at his orgy privacy trial.

Among thousands of documents we have unearthed from his past is a vile pamphlet saying ‘coloured immigrants’ spread ‘tuberculosis, VD and other terrible diseases like leprosy’.

It says they should be sent ‘home’ because ‘coloured immigration threatens your children’s health’.

Under oath at the High Court, Mr Mosley, who had been suing the News of the World for reporting his participation in what the newspaper alleged was a ‘Nazi-themed’ orgy, categorically denied such a leaflet existed. But the Mail has tracked down the hateful pamphlet in a historical archive. It states: ‘Published by Max Mosley.’

It was written for a 1961 by-election at which Mr Mosley, the youngest son of Oswald Mosley, leader of the pre-war British Union of Fascists, was the agent for his father’s post-war political party, the Union Movement (UM).

Asked about the leaflet at the High Court in 2008, he initially said ‘if there was such a leaflet, you would be able to produce it’.

He said he could not recall the leaflet, and then said it was ‘absolute nonsense’ to suggest such a pamphlet was put out.

The UM, at whose demonstrations Mr Mosley was twice arrested, is the inspiration for the banned British neo-Nazi group National Action, which borrowed the Mosley party’s symbol.

Not only that, when Thomas Mair, who murdered the Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016, shouted in court ‘Death to traitors, freedom for Britain’, the white supremacist organisation took the words as its slogan.

Earlier this week, the retiring head of counter-terrorism policing in the UK, Mark Rowley, warned in a major speech that the far-Right menace was growing. The Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner revealed four terror plots were disrupted last year and said of National Action: ‘We have a homegrown white supremacist neo-Nazi terror group which seeks to plan attacks.’

The discovery of the Mosley pamphlet – arguably one of the most racist official leaflets ever published in a modern British parliamentary election – raises the question of whether Mr Mosley committed perjury, which carries a prison sentence of up to seven years, and whether the trial might have had a different outcome if the judge had known of its existence.

Max Mosley, left, with what appears to be a cut on his right knuckle and a plaster on his left, stands next to his clench-fisted brother Alexander during the Notting Hill riots in 1958 

This week, the Mail offered Mr Mosley an opportunity to explain his past beliefs and evidence at the trial. He refused to answer a series of detailed questions, claiming none of them were ‘relevant today’.

The Mail will hand its dossier over to the Crown Prosecution Service and Mr Watson. Our investigation also reveals that:

• Mr Mosley led a group of neo-fascists including a convicted Holocaust-denier on a road trip across Europe, stopping en-route at the Dachau former Nazi concentration camp; 
• In Venice, he sat at the top table of senior neo-fascists at a far-Right conference also attended by former Waffen-SS officers including Otto ‘Scarface’ Skorzeny, Hitler’s favourite commando who ran ‘rat lines’ to South America for fleeing Nazis;
• Mr Mosley was at a violent UM counter-demonstration against a peaceful vigil in Trafalgar Square to mark the first anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa when scores of black protesters had been killed by apartheid regime security forces. He was subsequently convicted of obstructing a policeman; 
• Mr Mosley was arrested again after swinging a punch at a ‘Jew-baiting’ fascist rally in a Jewish quarter of London before insisting in court he ‘couldn’t be described by any stretch of imagination as a fighting person’; 
• Mr Mosley vociferously supported apartheid – the South African political and legal system that reduced the black majority to second-class citizens – then with Bernie Ecclestone did business under the regime which laid the foundations of a £6billion global Formula One motor racing empire.

At his privacy trial, Mr Mosley mocked the defence, saying he did not regret anything he’d said in 50 years: ‘I was very impressed at the way your people have trawled through every conceivable paper and local papers all over the country.

‘And equally impressed with myself, I have to say, that they have not been able to find one single thing which I regret saying even now however many years, 50 years, later.’

Earlier this month, the tycoon cited his victory in the orgy court case to demand newspapers erase the past by scrubbing his sex party from public record. He is attempting to use the Data Protection Act to prevent the media from ever mentioning it again.

The Mail investigation reveals that Mr Mosley has consistently erased controversial events in his life, either by not referring to them in his self-serving 2015 autobiography or by glossing over them when giving evidence to parliamentary committees.

The former F1 motorsport chief uses his millions to buy high-level political access and fund his pet crusade to muzzle Press freedoms – launched after the News of the World filmed him in the sadomasochistic orgy with five prostitutes.

Mr Mosley – via a family trust – is almost single-handedly bankrolling Impress, the controversial state-approved regulator of the Press that is shunned by every national newspaper. This has led to questions about Impress’s independence.

And he has given more than half a million pounds to Labour’s deputy leader – a sum that is one of the biggest political donations in modern British history. Mr Watson who, as shadow culture secretary, would be in charge of overseeing media regulation if Labour came to power, makes no secret of his quest for greater curbs on the Press.

Mr Mosley – via a family trust – is almost single-handedly bankrolling Impress, the controversial state-approved regulator of the Press. He appeared on Channel 4 News tonight

The revelations about Mr Mosley’s racist past raise troubling questions about whether the senior MP – 30 per cent of whose constituents in West Bromwich East in the Midlands are from ethnic minorities – was right to accept £540,000 in donations to date.

Mr Watson has said he is ‘proud to call Mr Mosley a friend’ while Mr Mosley, who tried to become a Tory MP under Margaret Thatcher in 1983 but was rejected by the Conservative Party, has lauded the Labour frontbencher as a ‘very admirable politician, a fearless campaigner against injustice and a good man’.

Last night Tom Watson said: ‘My views on Press regulation are well known and have not changed. The views expressed by Max as a young man are not the views he holds now, just as the Rothermere family no longer uses its newspapers to support fascism.’

The Mail put 24 detailed questions to Mr Mosley on Sunday. In response, he said: ‘This was all more than 50 years ago. None of these obviously slanted questions are relevant today. Like the Daily Mail, my political views have changed since the early 1960s.

‘My record in motorsport demonstrates that I do not tolerate racism. It appears that this historical investigation is yet another misconceived attempt to intimidate and deter me and others from supporting the vital reforms needed to protect ordinary people against the bullying of newspapers like the Daily Mail.’

Mr Mosley also denied having any conviction for neo-fascist disorder. 

Now Corbyn’s deputy Tom Watson is under pressure to return £540,000 from Max Mosley 

Tom Watson is under intense pressure to return more than £500,000 given to him by Max Mosley after the Mail exposed the former F1 tycoon’s racist past.

This includes the disclosure that Mr Mosley published an appalling racist pamphlet during a by-election campaign which claimed ‘coloured immigrants’ spread ‘terrible diseases like leprosy’ and should be sent ‘home’.

Our revelations are hugely embarrassing for Mr Watson, the MP for West Bromwich East – where around 30 per cent of constituents are from ethnic minorities. And they could trigger a new round of infighting in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party about the deputy leader’s funding arrangements with the multimillionaire.

Comrades: Labour’s deputy leader with Jeremy Corbyn 

In 2016 Mr Watson, who has described Mr Mosley as a ‘friend’, said after visiting a memorial in Israel to the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis: ‘I wanted to come back to Israel to pay respects on behalf of the UK Labour Party… ‘We remembered those who died in the Holocaust and renewed our determination to fight racism and anti-Semitism – whatever form it takes and wherever it exists.’

Yet three months later, in February 2017, he received £300,000 from Mr Mosley, who has previously sought to play down his links to his father’s far-Right Union Movement political party, set up following the demise of the British Union of Fascists.

The £300,000 donation (five times the amount given to Mr Watson in February 2017 by the GMB union) followed a £200,000 donation by Mr Mosley registered in June 2016 and £40,000 in August 2015.

In the House of Commons register of members’ interests, Mr Watson said the two biggest donations from Mr Mosley were donated via the Labour Party to support his office. The smallest one was to help fund his campaign to be Labour deputy leader.

Mr Watson is a founding member of the advisory committee for Hacked Off, the anti-Press pressure group.

Via a family trust, Mr Mosley is almost single-handedly bankrolling Impress, the Press regulator set up to offer ‘independent’ regulation under a State-approved scheme.

In February last year, ITV political editor Robert Peston suggested during an interview that Mr Mosley had ‘bought’ Mr Watson’s ‘influence’ through his donations.

Mr Watson replied that the Press and privacy campaigner had ‘given a donation to the Labour Party which has allowed me as deputy leader to increase our policy and research capacity’.

Earlier last year, when news of Mr Mosley’s £300,000 donation to the Labour deputy leader emerged, Mr Watson said: ‘I’m proud to call Max Mosley a friend and I’m delighted he has made a financial contribution to Labour.’

Mr Mosley has previously defended his donations to Mr Watson, calling him a ‘very admirable politician’.

The ex-Formula One boss has been a key figure in the campaign to impose State-sponsored regulation on the Press after he sued the News of the World for printing photos of him taking part in a sadomasochistic orgy with prostitutes — one of whom was dressed in a German military uniform.

Impress is the only regulator approved under the Royal Charter, which was agreed between the three main political parties and Hacked Off after the Leveson Inquiry recommended ‘voluntary, independent self-regulation’.

Both he and Impress officials have insisted the regulator is independent.

Vile leaflet that damns Mosley: Sorry Max, but the Daily Mail has unearthed your pamphlet – and it’s sickening

Richard Pendlebury and Bill Akass for the Daily Mail

Late morning, July 7, 2008, and motorsport tycoon Max Mosley is undergoing cross-examination at the Royal Courts of Justice. Mr Mosley, the youngest son of the British Union of Fascists leader Sir Oswald Mosley, has brought a breach of privacy action against the News of the World.

Three months earlier, the newspaper had published a front page account and online video footage of a sadomasochistic orgy in which the multi-millionaire had taken part with five prostitutes.

The newspaper claimed the orgy had a ‘Nazi’ or ‘concentration camp’ theme. Because of the Mosley family history, the report was in the public interest, it argued. The Nazi allegations were denied by Mr Mosley.

And so the 68-year-old was in the witness box being questioned by the Murdoch newspaper’s defence counsel, Mark Warby QC.

Mr Warby wanted to explore Mr Mosley’s own participation in the far-Right politics of his parents, Sir Oswald and Diana, Lady Mosley, at whose marriage in Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ home Adolf Hitler had been guest of honour.

 

This pamphlet was produced in support of one Walter Hesketh. In November 1961, Mr Hesketh was the Union Movement’s parliamentary candidate for Moss Side. The pamphlet — an identical copy of which can also be found in the Working Class Movement Library in nearby Salford — makes for instructive reading.

The QC was particularly interested in a by-election held in Moss Side, Manchester on November 7, 1961.

Sir Oswald’s Union Movement (UM) — the post-war reincarnation of his Jew-hating Blackshirts of the British Union of Fascists — had fielded a candidate.

A new minority had been identified as their racial scapegoat: Afro-Caribbean immigrants, of whom Moss Side — an area of considerable deprivation — had a significant community.

Max Mosley, a married Oxford graduate and student barrister, was the Party’s local election agent.

That meant he was legally responsible for the conduct of its campaign.

Questioned under oath by Mr Warby about whether he had distributed leaflets ‘urging voters to send the blacks home’ Mr Mosley answered: ‘Not as I recall.’

Mr Warby then asked: ‘Is there any truth in the suggestion . . . that leaflets were put out [by the Union Movement] alleging that coloured immigrants brought leprosy, syphilis and TB [tuberculosis]?’

This time Mr Mosley — under oath — could not have been more emphatic.

‘That is absolute nonsense,’ he said.

But the truth is there had been appalling racial slurs about disease in those leaflets and they had urged that blacks be sent ‘home’ to their countries of origin.

A Mail investigation has established that this incendiary material had been printed and distributed, in a constituency with thousands of black residents, under Max Mosley’s name.

At the time of that trial in 2008, the News of the World’s defence team had been unable to find a copy of the pamphlet and challenge Mosley’s recollection.

The defence QC suspected that the pamphlets had existed only because they had been referred to in a Guardian newspaper article a number of years earlier.

Walter Hesketh, unsuccessful British Union Movement candidate in the Moss Side Parliamentary by-election, pictured with Max Mosley, then his agent

As a trained barrister, Mr Mosley very well understood his interrogator’s difficulty.

‘If there was such a leaflet you would be able to produce it,’ he had observed coolly. Indeed, he even mocked the defence’s ability to explore his past.

‘I was very impressed at the way your people have trawled through every conceivable paper and local papers all over the country,’ he said.

‘And equally impressed with myself, I have to say, that they have not been able to find one single thing which I regret saying even now however many years, 50 years, later.’ The fact that the pamphlet wasn’t produced did not mean that it did not exist: it simply had not been unearthed by the defence.

But it did exist. It does exist. And now it has been discovered by the Mail.

In an envelope in a box marked ‘rare material — issue under close supervision’, in the local history archive at Manchester Central Library there is a sheaf of election literature.

Most of the documents are relics of mainstream party campaigns fought in the city in the 20 years after World War II.

But there is another pamphlet.

It was produced in support of one Walter Hesketh. In November 1961, Mr Hesketh was the Union Movement’s parliamentary candidate for Moss Side.

The leaflet was produced in support of ‘Union Movement’ candidate Walter Hesketh in 1961

The pamphlet — an identical copy of which can also be found in the Working Class Movement Library in nearby Salford — makes for instructive reading.

Under the heading ‘A Personal Message’, Mr Hesketh is quoted as saying: ‘If enough people vote for me . . . the Government will be sending coloured immigrants home instead of bringing more in.’

That, of course, was the policy pledge which his agent Max Mosley failed to ‘recall’ under oath.

Inside the pamphlet, other key aspects of the Union Movement’s manifesto are set out.

Number one on this list is a call for the ‘complete Union of Europe’. Britain and the Continental nations would exist under a common central government.

Certain British colonies would also form part of a racially pure superstate. ‘We can enter Europe with the (British) Dominions, but not with the old black colonies,’ the UM pamphlet states. The ‘coloured people in Britain’ would be sent back ‘home’ and given ‘help to develop their own civilisation’.

But to maintain those colonies as part of the new economic bloc would be to ‘ruin our economy because they [blacks] have an altogether different standard of life,’ and would undercut European industry.

Mosley outside the Royal Courts of Justice following the court case in 2008

The overtly racist nature of the UM by-election campaign is made even more explicit on the pamphlet’s back page.

Beneath the injunction: ‘Protect Your Family’ — and beside a drawing of a besuited white man making a phone call — the pamphlet reads: ‘This man is telephoning his wife to say what he would like to ‘digest’ is a good British dinner in a good British home.

‘Remember that . . . the Conservative candidate said you would have to ‘digest’ the coloured immigrants who are here already, and then ‘digest’ some more . . . To stop coloured immigration vote Hesketh.’

On the same page another headline warns ‘Protect Your Health’. There is a drawing of a blond boy in a hospital bed being examined by a doctor.

Mr Mosley at the High Court in 2008

The accompanying copy states: ‘There is no medical check on immigration. Tuberculosis, V.D. and other terrible diseases like leprosy are on the increase.

‘Coloured immigration threatens your children’s health.’

Who published this white supremacist tract, four years before the first Race Relations Act made such incitement to racial hatred a criminal offence?

The answer lies at the bottom of the pamphlet’s front page: ‘Published by Max Mosley.’ In other words, the pamphlet was produced by the same man who would tell the court under oath that the idea of it ever having existed was ‘absolute nonsense’.

It is difficult to understand the failure of Mr Mosley, who even his critics say has a brilliant legal mind, to recollect his publishing one of the most racist pieces of parliamentary election literature produced in postwar Britain.

If he did lie, he would have been committing perjury — an offence which is punishable by a prison sentence of up to seven years.

It is difficult to calculate the effect this memory lapse had on the outcome of his landmark orgy privacy trial in which Mr Justice Eady awarded Mr Mosley £60,000 damages.

If the defence had been able to produce that devastating pamphlet, would it have damaged the credibility of both Mr Mosley’s testimony and his integrity?

One thing is certain: Max Mosley’s victory against the News of the World at the High Court in 2008 and the failure to expose the extent of his racist past provided him with both the platform and moral justification to pursue his critics in the Press.

If, however, his activities with the UM had been exposed, he surely would not have been able to assume the self-righteous mantle of victim and crusader, using the Mosley family millions to become one of the most influential figures in today’s Britain.

He has bankrolled Labour deputy leader Tom Watson and Impress, the State-approved media watchdog which critics say opens the door to statutory control of the Press — not to mention currently using the Data Protection Act to try to ‘airbrush’ his orgy from history by bringing legal actions against newspapers which refer to it.

‘I can afford to cause trouble,’ he boasted in a 2015 GQ magazine interview, conducted by sympathetic former Labour propagandist Alastair Campbell.

Mosley added: ‘If I want to be friends with the Prime Minister and I give a million pounds I will get access and invitations.

‘It may be wrong, but it is not illegal.’

Between August 2015 and February 2017, Mr Mosley gave no less than £540,000 to support Labour Party deputy leader and shadow culture secretary Tom Watson, who says he is ‘proud’ to call Mr Mosley a friend.

Mr Mosley has also pledged £3.8 million via a family trust to fund Impress, the controversial State-approved Press regulator which is underwritten by statute and supported by Mr Watson and the pressure group Hacked Off, but shunned by the newspaper industry which views it as a threat to freedom of expression.

The Moss Side by-election is merely one unwritten chapter in Max Mosley’s secret past.

In recent months, the Mail has examined public and privately held archives and interviewed several of Mr Mosley’s contemporaries, including senior figures from the UM who have never spoken before.

We compared these accounts with the testimony Mr Mosley has given as a witness at Parliamentary select committees, under oath at both the privacy trial and the Leveson Inquiry into the Press, and as the author of his 2015 autobiography Formula One And Beyond.

Again and again, as we shall reveal, one is reminded of criticism levelled at his father on the 1975 publication of Sir Oswald’s authorised biography, written by Max Mosley’s university friend Robert (now Lord) Skidelsky.

By orchestrating an ‘entirely unconvincing whitewash of his career’ which allowed him ‘a modicum of social and political rehabilitation’ Sir Oswald had shown himself to be an ‘expert forgetter,’ said one reviewer.

It seems that forgetfulness runs in the family still.