Max Mosley - Politics

Politics

From their teens to early twenties, Mosley and his brother were involved with their father's post-war party, the Union Movement (UM), which advocated a united Europe as its core issue. Trevor Grundy, a central figure in the UM's Youth Movement, writes of the 16-year-old Mosley painting the flash and circle symbol on walls in London on the night of the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary (4 November 1956). The flash and circle was used by both the UM and the pre-war BUF. He also says Mosley organised a couple of large parties as a way "to get in with lively, ordinary, normal young people, girls as well as boys, and attract them to the Movement by showing that we were like them and didn't go on about Hitler and Mussolini, Franco and British Fascism all the time." Mosley met his future wife Jean at such a party. Mosley and Alexander were photographed posing as Teddy Boys in Notting Hill during the 1958 race riots between Afro-Caribbeans and local white gangs of Teddy Boys. The following year, they canvassed for their father when he ran as a Union Movement candidate for the nearby Kensington North seat in the 1959 General Election. Sir Oswald used racist rhetoric during the campaign, which was run largely on anti-immigration issues.

Mosley was later an election agent for the Union Movement, supporting Walter Hesketh as parliamentary candidate for Moss Side in 1962. The motor racing journalist Alan Henry describes him as one of his father's "right-hand men" at the time of a violent incident in 1962, in which Sir Oswald was knocked down by a mob in London and saved from serious injury by his son's intervention. As a result of his involvement in this fracas, Mosley was arrested and charged with threatening behaviour. He was later cleared at Old Street Magistrates' Court on the grounds that he was trying to protect his father. In 1964, Mosley himself was a prospective UM candidate.

In the early 1980s, Mosley attempted a political career, working for the UK Conservative Party and hoping to become a parliamentary candidate. Bernie Ecclestone's biographer, Terry Lovell, writes that he gave up this aspiration after being unimpressed by "the calibre of senior party officials". He also felt his name would be a handicap and has since said "If I had a completely open choice in my life, I would have chosen party politics, but because of my name, that's impossible." By the late 1990s he had become a supporter of the UK Labour Party.