Mosley the tactician
"It makes no difference to me what a man does for a living," said Vito Corleone to Virgil Sollozzo in The Godfather. Corleone was explaining that his refusal to take part in the narcotics trade had nothing to do with any personal moral objections. When the lurid story about Max Mosley's sadomasochistic orgy was splashed across the headlines of the News of The World, probably the tawdriest example of the incredibly bad British gutter press you will find, I thought no more of it than pity for a man who had clearly been set up. If a chap wants to spend his evenings paying five prostitutes to whip and cane him while in the all together, so be it. Nothing for me to pass judgment on. It surely cannot be reasonable that the chap should then find that he has been volunteered for a key part in a XXX porn video with neither his consent nor any payment! It seems that Mosley had upset someone enough to arrange for a video film of his, shall we say "unconventional", antics to be taken and made available to a gleeful tabloid journalist. So far, so uncontroversial. But Mosley found himself squarely in the soup.
The orgy alone did not warrant the worldwide headlines after the News of the World expose. If that was all there was to the story, the tabloid’s editors would probably have tucked it away in an inside page and instead dredged up something lurid about a footballer or a minor royal. What did for Mosley was a Nazi spin to the story. The shenanigans with the whores apparently entailed an enactment of a Nazi concentration camp complete with striding “soldiers” bellowing commands and one of the girls dressed in the standard concentration camp striped prisoner uniform. I am not convinced. One of the "glaring" pieces of evidence was that the commands were delivered and accepted in German. Well, Mosley has never made secret of the fact that he studied in Germany in his youth and is fluent in German. "What about the striped uniform?" I hear you ask. One of the girls was wearing a dress with stripes. Don't girls sometimes do that?
Mosley's problem had more to do with his history than anything else. He is the son of British fascist Oswald Mosley who was jailed during the Second World War as a threat to state security because of his long standing association with the German Nazi party. So close was Oswald to the Nazis that he married Max's mother in Berlin at the home of Joseph Goebbels with Adolph Hitler in attendance. The younger Mosley, Max, never shied from defending his father and was even hauled before the courts for attacking anti-fascist demonstrators in 1961. To add to this rather unsavoury list, Mosley dabbled in politics and has long been on the right wing end of the political spectrum. He is famous for being fined for obstructing a policeman while demonstrating in favour of apartheid in the sixties. In an early display of bollocks of steel, Mosley campaigned in the sixties in Moss Side (a black area of Manchester) for blacks to be sent back to their homes.
I do not think it would be thought unreasonable of me to declare that this record places Max Mosley in the box marked “Class SH1T”.
It can, therefore, be safely said that motor racing allowed Mosley an escape route from his past. By concentrating on setting out rules on engine capacity and tyre grooves rather than legislating on the appropriateness of darkie citizens in a northern European country, Mosley was allowed to build a formidable and, some might say, respectable reputation. The embarrassing nature of the tabloid sting does not do much for the man's future respectability but, since the story broke out, he has consistently argued that it has nothing to do with his job. If the Nazi allegations are untrue, you could say that Mosley is right. He decided to test his contention by placing it before the FIA. An extraordinary meeting was convened at the FIA's headquarters in Paris today and a vote among all of the delegates was held.
Mosley won the vote by a clear majority. He took a tactical gamble and won. Vintage Mosley. This has upset some people and could lead eventually to Mosley having to quit despite his decisive win. Various representatives of motor racing organisations around the world have expressed their outrage but it is the Germans who are the most upset. No surprise there. When BMW and Mercedes called for his resignation as the scandal was first hitting the headlines, Mosley "tactfully" reminded the two companies of their own Nazi associations (there is no shortage of photographs of jackbooted Nazi officers giving the Nazi salute from staff cars bearing the unmistakeable badges of the Stuttgart and Munich motor vehicle factories).
For a man who took the thrill out of wheel on wheel driving and replaced it with a competition about tactical thinking, it is perhaps not surprising that Max Mosley should resort to wily tactics to extricate himself from the darkest hole he has ever crawled into in his life. Mosley is a man hardened by history to public opprobrium. He is, it would appear, his father’s son.
Gitau
3 June 2008
The orgy alone did not warrant the worldwide headlines after the News of the World expose. If that was all there was to the story, the tabloid’s editors would probably have tucked it away in an inside page and instead dredged up something lurid about a footballer or a minor royal. What did for Mosley was a Nazi spin to the story. The shenanigans with the whores apparently entailed an enactment of a Nazi concentration camp complete with striding “soldiers” bellowing commands and one of the girls dressed in the standard concentration camp striped prisoner uniform. I am not convinced. One of the "glaring" pieces of evidence was that the commands were delivered and accepted in German. Well, Mosley has never made secret of the fact that he studied in Germany in his youth and is fluent in German. "What about the striped uniform?" I hear you ask. One of the girls was wearing a dress with stripes. Don't girls sometimes do that?
Mosley's problem had more to do with his history than anything else. He is the son of British fascist Oswald Mosley who was jailed during the Second World War as a threat to state security because of his long standing association with the German Nazi party. So close was Oswald to the Nazis that he married Max's mother in Berlin at the home of Joseph Goebbels with Adolph Hitler in attendance. The younger Mosley, Max, never shied from defending his father and was even hauled before the courts for attacking anti-fascist demonstrators in 1961. To add to this rather unsavoury list, Mosley dabbled in politics and has long been on the right wing end of the political spectrum. He is famous for being fined for obstructing a policeman while demonstrating in favour of apartheid in the sixties. In an early display of bollocks of steel, Mosley campaigned in the sixties in Moss Side (a black area of Manchester) for blacks to be sent back to their homes.
I do not think it would be thought unreasonable of me to declare that this record places Max Mosley in the box marked “Class SH1T”.
It can, therefore, be safely said that motor racing allowed Mosley an escape route from his past. By concentrating on setting out rules on engine capacity and tyre grooves rather than legislating on the appropriateness of darkie citizens in a northern European country, Mosley was allowed to build a formidable and, some might say, respectable reputation. The embarrassing nature of the tabloid sting does not do much for the man's future respectability but, since the story broke out, he has consistently argued that it has nothing to do with his job. If the Nazi allegations are untrue, you could say that Mosley is right. He decided to test his contention by placing it before the FIA. An extraordinary meeting was convened at the FIA's headquarters in Paris today and a vote among all of the delegates was held.
Mosley won the vote by a clear majority. He took a tactical gamble and won. Vintage Mosley. This has upset some people and could lead eventually to Mosley having to quit despite his decisive win. Various representatives of motor racing organisations around the world have expressed their outrage but it is the Germans who are the most upset. No surprise there. When BMW and Mercedes called for his resignation as the scandal was first hitting the headlines, Mosley "tactfully" reminded the two companies of their own Nazi associations (there is no shortage of photographs of jackbooted Nazi officers giving the Nazi salute from staff cars bearing the unmistakeable badges of the Stuttgart and Munich motor vehicle factories).
For a man who took the thrill out of wheel on wheel driving and replaced it with a competition about tactical thinking, it is perhaps not surprising that Max Mosley should resort to wily tactics to extricate himself from the darkest hole he has ever crawled into in his life. Mosley is a man hardened by history to public opprobrium. He is, it would appear, his father’s son.
Gitau
3 June 2008
posted by Gitau at 8:19 pm
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