Kinky Sex, Please, We're British

Officials at the FIA did not respond to NEWSWEEK's requests for comment, and a spokesman for Mosley said he was not available to comment. A press release issued by the federation April 9 said the upcoming extraordinary general assembly of the body called by Mosley would address the press coverage "relating to his private life" and would include a vote of confidence. Judging by the public reaction so far, it's unlikely he will win it. Industry icons like three-time Grand Prix winner Sir Jackie Stewart and the former Austrian champion Niki Lauda said he should step down for the good of the sport. Motoring associations in the United States, Germany, Canada and the Netherlands have all said he should either quit or seriously consider doing so. Even the Crown Prince of Bahrain wrote to Mosley saying it would be "inappropriate" for him to attend the Bahrain Grand Prix last Sunday as a result of the scandal.

He does have some defenders. Current Grand Prix drivers have been more circumspect, and the British motoring community has mostly stayed out of the matter. Bernie Ecclestone, the powerful boss of Formula One, expressed qualified support for Mosley. "I'm happy with Max," he told the BBC. "He will know what he needs to do." And Mosley claimed in his letter to the ADAC that he had received many messages of support from the motoring community, which encouraged him to stay on the job.

Mosley's defense rests on his claim that whatever happened in that torture chamber in a Chelsea luxury apartment, there was no Nazi role-playing involved, and nothing illegal took place. Indeed the snippet of the video the News of the World released, which has been viewed millions of times worldwide by now, does not very clearly show anything explicitly Nazi in it. A High Court judge ruled Wednesday that the News of the World could not be prevented from posting it, since it had already been so widely disseminated. "It has entered the public domain to the extent that there is, in practical terms, no longer anything which the law can protect. The dam has effectively burst," Justice Eady said, according to Britain's Press Association. On the first day it was posted, 1.4 million people viewed the News of the World clip. Eady also noted that the material was "intrusive and demeaning" but that it did not seem to him to support the paper's claims of Nazi role-playing in the proceedings. "The very brief extracts that I was shown," said the judge, "seemed to consist mainly of people spanking each other's bottoms." The 90-second video, which even included part of a tea break during the proceedings, is apparently an excerpt of a longer one that the paper said it would send to every member of the FIA's governing body documenting the entire five-hour-long session.

Whatever happens to him, Mosley can take heart that a rollicking sex scandal does not necessarily spell the end of a career in public life in Britain. Another characteristic is how often the tabloids' victims seem to bounce back. After David Blunkett was forced to resign as Home Secretary following allegations that he helped his lover get a visa for her nanny from the Home Office, he later rejoined the Blair administration as transport minister. Jeffrey Archer emerged from prison with his peerage intact and published his prison diaries, as well as other books. Sven Eriksson, the Swede who was manager of England's soccer football club for five years, left after a series of heavily reported embarrassments involving a girlfriend and a mistress, and then a sting by the News of the World's "Fake Sheikh," an undercover reporter who pretended to be offering him a job to desert England after the 2006 World Cup. Eriksson is now the highly paid manager of one of the country's major soccer teams, Manchester City. Even in the Profumo scandal, at a much less forgiving time, 1963, the prostitutes involved went on to become minor celebrities.

When it comes to politicians, the tabloids have always done better in Tory administrations than Labour ones. The saying goes that Conservatives have sex scandals and Labourites tend toward money ones—possibly because the Tories don't get enough of the former and Labour doesn't have enough of the latter. Blunkett was an exception, but the accusations against him—of an affair with a married woman—were comparatively tame. When he was forced to resign from Blair's government a second time, it was over allegedly improper financial dealings. David Mellor was forced to resign from Conservative prime minister John Major's cabinet in 1992 after being hounded by the press about an extramarital affair, but he remained in politics and later even wrote a regular column for one of the tabloids that had been his worst persecutor.

Those were admittedly different times, in the pre-YouTube age. None of those earlier victims have had had to endure their exploits documented in living if somewhat blurry color for all the world to see. Surviving that will be a major feat.

© 2008