Max Mosley’s future as president of the FIA — the governing body of motor racing’s Formula One — will be decided next Tuesday when he comes before a meeting of its extraordinary general assembly.

The hearing, which takes place amid a chorus of calls for his resignation, is the latest in a string of cases where celebrities or others in the public eye have found their private lives exposed.

George Orwell wrote in 1946 that the public like nothing better on a Sunday afternoon than to “put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World”. Readers of the newspaper were entertained on March 30 by a detailed exposé of Mr Mosley’s sex life (“motor racing chief Max Mosley is today exposed as a masochist sex pervert”) that must have made those involved in motor sport fall off their sofas.

What drives Mr Mosley, it seems, is being whipped by prostitutes and (according to the newspaper but denied by him) acting out concentration camp scenes. But while there are many reasons for removing Mr Mosley from office, his sordid private life, as exposed in the News of the World, is not one of them.

When the extraordinary general assembly meets in Paris it should note, as Jane Austen observed in Emma, that “one half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other”, resolve to respect his right to privacy and accelerate on to the next business.

There are many people inside and outside the FIA who would be delighted to see a new president. Mr Mosley’s power within the FIA, real or perceived, makes otherwise forceful company directors reluctant to challenge his policies, damaging the good health of an organisation that needs debate and dissent if it is not to be left on the starting grid in competition with other sports. But if Mr Mosley’s domination of the FIA may justify his dismissal, that he likes to be dominated by prostitutes in his private life does not.

In 1890 in The Harvard Law Review, Louis D. Brandeis (a future Supreme Court justice) and Samuel D. Warren argued for a right of privacy to combat the excesses of the popular press, the characteristics of which they identified as an eagerness “to satisfy a prurient taste” in readers by publishing “the details of sexual relations”. A century later, the right to privacy is recognised throughout the developed legal world. Any intrusion into private life must be justified by the public interest. A person’s sex life is “a most intimate aspect of an individual’s private life” and so “particularly strong reasons by way of justification are required”, as the European Court of Human Rights recognised in Lustig-Prean v United Kingdom in 1999 (the case that held the exclusion of homosexuals from the Armed Forces to be an unjustifiable breach of privacy rights).

The News of the World breached Mr Mosley’s legal right to privacy, as Mr Mosley will establish in his legal claim that is pending in the High Court. There is no conceivable public interest, however interested the public may be, in a newspaper exposing that Mr Mosley, in the late George Melly’s evocative description of his sexual urges, is “chained to a lunatic” (and I do not refer to any of the ladies involved). The newspaper seeks to justify the intrusion by arguing that Mr Mosley is a public figure and the public are entitled to know what sort of man he is.

But as Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, as Master of the Rolls, stated in the Naomi Campbell case in 2002: “The fact that an individual has achieved prominence on the public stage does not mean that his private life can be laid bare by the media.” Even if Mr Mosley’s sex life involves fantasising about concentration camps (which he denies), that does not make it anything more than part of his fantasy sex life. To recognise a defence for the newspaper in such a case would be generally to deny public figures a right to privacy for their sexual identity.

Some of the delegates to the FIA extraordinary general assembly will be asking themselves whether, in the light of the revelations, Mr Mosley can continue to do his job. After all, the Crown Prince of Bahrain asked Mr Mosley not to attend the grand prix in his country the week after publication of the story. The answer is that delegates should not be basing their vote on the reactions of those who would not recognise a human right if it drove up on the inside lane and overtook them with the horn blaring.

Of course, we cannot now pretend that we do not know about Mr Mosley’s peculiar habits. So Mr Mosley must tolerate sniggering at his expense. But that does not alter the bare facts of this sordid saga. How and with whom Mr Mosley likes to have sex is, quite simply, none of our business.

It is a breach of the right to privacy for the News of the World to pay prostitutes so it can titillate its readers by telling them about famous people who pay prostitutes. That the newspaper infringed Mr Mosley’s rights is no justification for the FIA delegates also to do so. Kiss-and-tell, or in Mr Mosley’s case whip-and-tell, is not a good reason for the FIA to tell Mr Mosley that he can kiss goodbye to his job.

The author is a practising barrister at Blackstone Chambers in The Temple and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford

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