It’s been a while since Blade has thought about Max Mosley, but, like a bad penny, the Formula 1 man has an unerring knack of popping up just when you had forgotten he even existed.
This week, Mosley has been giving evidence before the House of Commons Culture Select Committee about privacy law. He says we need one, media lawyers who know their onions say we’ve already got one, the Daily Mail says Mosley isn’t very nice and, in the midst of the storm, MPs appear to gasp reverentially at Mosley’s every word. Meanwhile, Mr Justice Eady, the man castigated by the Mail’s editor, Paul Dacre, for having introduced a privacy law, looks on and makes no sound.
There is no doubt that Mosley is a remarkable man. Anyone who can cheerfully admit to having enjoyed S&M orgies for 45 years without telling his wife has got to be worth listening to. But is he right when he says that judges should determine what is published, or not published, by newspapers? Or, as Stephen Glover has it in the Mail: “If a bishop were keeping a mistress, or a top athlete taking drugs, said Mr Mosley, ‘a sensible society would not publish the fact that a role model’s done something he shouldn’t’.”
It is, to be sure, a conundrum. Many of the fourth estate’s most eloquent practitioners would look every bit as ludicrous as Mosley were their sex lives, which are not always models of monogamy, revealed. That’s the thing about sex – it can be somewhat undignified. But did we need to know about Mosley’s basement antics?
Probably not. Mosley may be a deviant, deceitful old cove but knowledge of his activities has neither enriched the world nor made a blind bit of difference to his status as a so-called “role model”. Here, though, is where he is badly wrong. When role models, such as athletes, take drugs and cheat, there is every justification for exposing their wrongdoing. Likewise, a supposed exemplar of moral rectitude, such as a bishop, if he takes a mistress.
Our privacy law is developed enough to deal with all of these scenarios, and, thanks to Eady J, we know that the courts are likely to take a dim view of the exposure of sexual matters for the sheer salaciousness of doing so. But this should be after the event, with a claimant having a remedy in damages. The idea of a judge arbitrating on a story pre-publication, as a matter of course, is a nonsense.
Pictured courtesy of Ferrarifan1956: Michael Schumacher looks perplexed as Max Mosley tells him that there is more to life than winning races.
