Max Fights On

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, especially when Max Mosley reaches for his lawyer. Last year when the FIA supremo and son of Oswald won his case against the News of the World it was just about possible to imagine this was an isolated incident. The NoW conducted its defence badly. There was very little on which to base a public interest argument. I still think Lord jutice Eady got the balance between sections 8 and 10 of the ECHR deplorably wrong, but others argued that this was not the birth of a British privacy law. They said journalists were protesting too much. Any reporter who imagined that was true should take a look at what Max is up to now. It is clearly set out in this interview in the Independent on Sunday. Max Mosley does not just want a privacy law. He wants prior restraint as well. In his ideal Britain editors would need a judge's permission to publish allegations like the ones the NoW made about him. I fear Max has no understanding of the role of a free press or of the intimate relationship between editorial liberty and democracy. Like many rich people he appears to imagine that journalists exist to publicise his business ventures but never to question his conduct. He gives the impression of believing that we are pesky irritants who need to be controlled by the authorities. I hope he is the latest, not the last to make that mitake.