Ruthless Formula One supremo who weathered scandal and transformed motor sport into a global spectacle
The view that politics should be kept out of sport would never have cut any ice with Max Mosley, who has died aged 81. As the son of the British Union of Fascists leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, he was brought up in a notoriously political household during the 1940s and 50s, and during his 20s was involved in his father’s postwar Union Movement. After being drawn into motor racing in the early 1960s, he demonstrated that sport could be politics continued by other means. He eventually rose to the presidency of motor sport’s governing body, the FIA, but while he was admired for his clarity of mind and powerful intellect, he was feared for the ruthlessness with which he would manipulate events to suit himself and crush his opponents.
These qualities came to the fore in 2008 when he found himself embroiled in scandal after the News of the World exposed his involvement in what it described as a “sick Nazi orgy” that featured German sex workers and sado-masochistic sex. He weathered a storm of demands for his resignation as FIA president and successfully sued the newspaper for breach of privacy, despite what the high court judge in the case described as his “reckless and almost self-destructive” behaviour.