Max Mosley’s case against the News of the World is about two things:

Straightforward libel in their false portrayal of his activities as being ‘Nazi’ in flavour.

Unjustified invasion of his personal privacy.

It’s not unnatural that journalists should make a lot of noise in protection of what they perceive as their traditional right – the sacrosanct unassailable right of newspapers to write anything they like, unless it’s wrong (of course).

All Trade Unions and Professional Associations fight to make life easy for their members – that’s what they’re there for. Inevitably, a lot of baloney gets broadcast; not a little disingenuousness, too. Bob Satchwell, chairman of the Society of Editors, in an interview with the Independent bleats predictably, “What happens in these cases is that the court seems to favour privacy over the public’s right to know. The courts seem to have sympathy for celebrities rather then the interests of the media.”

In fact, in line with its function, the court has sympathy with the individual whose privacy has been compromised, whether a celebrity or not. The fact that the Shag Rags choose to fill their pages with stories of the sexual activity of celebrities, rather than private individuals is irrelevant.

And consider this…

Mr Tom Crone is quite an important figure, certainly with a public function in as much as he oversees the legality of the output of the country’s two biggest-selling newspapers. Imagine the unthinkable, that a rival newspaper decided to reveal private details of Tome Crone’s sex-life. I have no idea how clear Mr Crone’s conscience is as he slips into the confessional, if he ever does, or if he has any eccentric sexual tastes – probably not, but whatever he has done, within or outside his marriage, I’m guessing he wouldn’t like to see it photographed and written about on the front page of the People. Or perhaps they might take pictures of him and his attractive wife lying on a beach in Greece, or wherever the Crone family goes on holiday; she might be topless; he might be showing a little too much flab. He wouldn’t like that either. But his papers do it all the time to people with just as much right to privacy, who, the papers claim, are legitimate victims, although the editors, and discerning readers know that the only ‘justification’ for this kind of journalism is the need to sell papers to a public whose prurient obsession with celebrities has been cynically and consistently whipped up by their papers for the last dozen years.

Max Mosley, father and husband of over four decades, evidently likes sex with a difference, and being a considerate man, doesn’t expect his wife to provide it. Every so often he pays girls who are happy to oblige, then he thanks them and has a cuppa with them. For the Screws to describe what was shown on their “Family” Website as brutal and depraved is an absurd (if utterly characteristic) overstatement.

In revealing it (forgetting their grotesque embellishment of it) they can provide no justification that this activity has any bearing whatsoever on Mosley’s function as President of the FIA. The absurd irony is that if it did have a bearing now (it apparently doesn’t, as the vote to keep him in situ showed), it would be solely because the News of World had run the story.

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