by Max Mosley
Our first meeting was with the minister of sport, who was very welcoming and gave us tea but was clearly an expert in areas more connected with recent conflicts. His main civil servant, quite old and probably a survivor from the previous regime, said: ‘This old head thinks this is a matter for the minister of finance.’ I thought that sounded promising. A meeting was set up.
No fewer than three ministers turned up for the meeting, headed by Dr Nathan Shamuyarira, then minister for information and tourism. He had spent time in London and was very politically aware. He opened the meeting by saying, ‘Tell me, Mr Mosley, are you any relation of the famous Oswald Mosley?’ I thought Humphry Berkeley and the other person with us were going to die. They obviously feared the name was not top of the appreciation list in a newly independent Zimbabwe. I replied that, yes, I was his son but that up to now, in motor racing, everyone assumed I must be related to Alf Moseley, the coach builder from Leicester. I told Shamuyarira he was the very first to ask about my father in a motor sport context. There was much laughter from the Zimbabwe ministers and relief for Berkeley. However, disappointingly, the Zimbabwe idea went nowhere.
16
AN ATTEMPT AT UK POLITICS
The 1982 Imola race had shown the weakness of FOCA and made me realise it could never be a reliable power base in any conflict with the governing body. The teams could not be relied upon and the establishment would always win in the end. At the same time, I was beginning to think seriously about British politics. Politics was what really interested me and would have been my career from the beginning had it not been for my family name. It now seemed possible after my father’s death in 1980. While he was alive it was not on – he would not have opposed me in any way but one never knew what he might do or say next.
My aunt Debo, the youngest of the Mitford sisters, was married to Andrew Devonshire, whose uncle was Harold Macmillan, the former Conservative prime minister. They invited me to Chatsworth to discuss the idea with Macmillan, who was by then living there more or less permanently. He and I talked late into the night after everyone had gone to bed, but I was distracted by his disturbing habit of lighting his pipe and not noticing that the match had burned down to his fingers. It looked so painful I could hardly bear to watch but he didn’t seem to notice. He and my father were contemporaries and knew each other well in the period up to 1931. They had agreed about the need for Keynesian measures to deal with the economic problems of that time.
Macmillan’s view was that no serious figure in politics would mind in the least who my father was and he thought that no voter would care, either. I later came to think he was almost certainly right but that the people in between – those who decide whether or not you get a seat – might be more of a problem. There was also the risk that my opponents would drag my father into any controversy.
Sure enough, nearly 30 years later when I suggested to a parliamentary select committee that a member of the public should be warned if their privacy was about to be invaded, an idiot Daily Mail columnist did just that. He wrote: ‘A privacy law would suit Mr Mosley very nicely. Like his father he does not believe in freedom.’ All I had suggested was that before a person’s privacy was irremediably breached, he or she should be allowed to ask a judge to rule. No rational adult would label that a denial of freedom and what my long-deceased father had to do with it escaped me entirely. But it illustrated the sort of moronic tabloid nonsense I would have had to contend with in British politics.
Nevertheless, encouraged by what Macmillan had said, I decided to try. At the end of 1982 I stopped all my motor sport activity, including with FOCA, and began by helping the Tories at the 1983 Bermondsey by-election. The agent there was Ron Green; very experienced, very canny and the permanent agent in the Westminster North constituency. After the by-election, I became involved in Westminster North, where the sitting MP was Sir John Wheeler. Since I had decided on politics, I wanted to get on with it. But voluntary helpers are part-time, so it was not possible to throw myself as fully into political activity as I would have wished.
This was frustrating but I engaged on projects such as computerising the electoral register, commonplace now but unusual back in 1983. I got on well with the local party workers, particularly Ian Harvey, who was clearly very able but whose successful parliamentary career had been wrecked when as a junior minister he was caught with a guardsman in the bushes of St James’s Park. Nowadays, they could have got married had they wished but back in 1958 homosexuality was still illegal in the UK and it finished his career.
One of the benefits of the decision to get out of motor racing was that I found myself with some free time at last. I decided to learn to fly a helicopter before I got too old. I loved it – it’s the nearest thing one can imagine to a magic carpet and I had endless fun learning because the instructor, although very professional and competent, was not above showing me occasionally what the machine could do. After my first solo flight I thought long and hard but decided not to pursue it, realising I had the wrong temperament – you don’t take risks with helicopters. Also, they are not suitable for part-time pilots. Had I continued, an accident would have been highly likely. I had fun, though, hovering outside the kitchen window of our little house near Bicester while the instructor held his hands up so Jean could see I was flying it.
The 1983 general election was the first time I could become fully engaged. It was a successful campaign and friendships were cemented. Ron Green and Ian Harvey, who was a key figure in Westminster North, were both on the more liberal wing of the party and this resonated with me. I was only a ward chairman but they encouraged me to go to Central Office and try to get on the candidates’ list. When I met the person in charge of the list, a vice-chairman of the party, I thought him deeply unimpressive and, no doubt, he thought the same of me. But the really worrying thing was the other people waiting to see him, who struck me as extremely odd, to say the least.
Perhaps it was a day set aside for oddballs and they saw me as one of them but, whatever the reason, it was a far cry from Macmillan and his advice. With someone in charge like the man I had just met, I was certain it would take me a long time to get on the candidates’ list and I would still be left with the problem of finding a constituency. There was a real danger of spending years looking for a seat. If the person in charge of the list was such an obvious dud, what would those further down the chain of command be like? Although I might strike lucky, I might also waste ten years. By then I would be in my fifties and it would be too late for anything else.
So in 1985, I went back to motor racing, but this time with the intention of becoming part of the establishment because it seemed the next best thing to politics. Returning to the Bar or some sort of business activity did not appeal, apart from which I had a lot of motor sport experience. It was probably the right decision. As things turned out, I think I was able to achieve far more in real (as opposed to motor sport) politics with the FIA than I could have in UK domestic politics, unless I had been extremely lucky and found myself in an important ministerial position. It had been an interesting diversion but I still hoped to do something significant with my life and didn’t want to risk wasting years on British politics.
17
BACK TO MOTOR SPORT AND FIA ELECTIONS
I had remained in contact with Bernie and Formula One and even went to the occasional race. In mid-1985, Bernie and I met Balestre for dinner at a restaurant near his home in the South of France, where we suggested I take over FISA’s Manufacturers’ Commission. The person currently holding the post was not very competent and Balestre recognised this. The commission was made up of the competition directors from all the major motor manufacturers, and it was important that they should feel their interests were understood and properly represented. It would mean me filling the car industry’s seat on the World Motor Sport Council.
When we put the idea forward, I could sense Balestre was uncomfortable with the thought of bringing me into the heart of his fiefdom, but he didn
’t get on well with the car industry. When he edited L’Auto-Journal in the 1950s and ’60s, he often ran campaigns against some of them. Now that he was about to become president of the entire FIA, not just its sporting commission, he felt he was on a par with heads of state rather than car company CEOs. The quarrels at the start of the decade had long receded – he had established something close to a modus vivendi with Bernie and probably thought I might be a useful link to the industry. Since I would be concerned with other forms of motor sport, not Formula One, he rather reluctantly agreed. Although he smelled danger, he felt he could not really refuse.
The appointment procedure was not very democratic. The manufacturers didn’t want me and there was an election within the commission that resulted in 14 votes for the incumbent, five for another candidate and only three for me. But the vote was merely a proposal to the World Council. The final choice was the council’s and Balestre kept his word, successfully urging my appointment. Bernie and I were now both on the World Council, but under the Concorde Agreement the manufacturers’ seat was still occupied by Ferrari whenever Formula One was discussed.
Just before I began in my new role there was a bad accident during a World Rally Championship event in Corsica. The Finnish driver Henri Toivonen and his Italian-American co-driver Sergio Cresto were killed when their Lancia Delta S4 crashed and burst into flames. It was on a remote stretch of road and there was no one there to help them. The powerful and savagely fast Group B cars were virtually racing cars but used on the road and, apart from very high performance, were extremely vulnerable in a crash.
Balestre reacted by banning them, with effect from the following season. He claimed to be able to do this on grounds of safety, but his position under the regulations was weak. This time, though, his opposition was not the alliance of disparate elements and interests that made up FOCA but Peugeot, a major French manufacturer whose team boss was Jean Todt. Peugeot sued him in the French courts and won FF400,000 (about €61,000) damages at first instance. This was a massive award by French standards, as their courts are reluctant to award financial compensation, and it put Balestre in a serious fix.
He asked me to persuade the competition managers of the other manufacturers to support the ban and vote against Peugeot. This was at my first meeting of the Manufacturers’ Commission, where I had just been imposed as chairman, and the Peugeot representative on the commission was, of course, Jean Todt.
Improbably, I succeeded. Despite their own interests, even the competition managers who were running Group B cars seemed to feel the ban was probably the right thing to do. The rally community was very shocked by the deaths of two leading competitors in horrific circumstances. This, combined with big-company reluctance to challenge the establishment, which had caused us such difficulty in 1980 and 1981, proved decisive.
Balestre was waiting for the result of the vote in his office at the French Federation. When I told him the news I was given a full Gallic embrace. He was relieved, delighted, and sat me down for a long talk. He confided that he was very worried about Bernie and the difficulties he might still cause the FIA. I explained that when the English want to neutralise someone who is a bit of a revolutionary and might destabilise the establishment, they don’t usually kill or imprison them. The very effective English technique is to bring them into the establishment and seduce them into a different approach to life. That way you get a friend rather than a martyr. I advised him to bring Bernie into the FIA. Although I thought this was sound advice, I was conscious that it would increase Bernie’s, and thus my, influence within the FIA, but I also owed Bernie for his help in securing my position. After some discussion, Balestre accepted. With his usual control over the institutions of the FIA he made Bernie a vice-president of the FIA; not just FISA, its sporting arm, but the entire organisation. Bernie was now in charge of FIA promotional affairs, a turn of events that began a new phase.
I went out of my way to make the Manufacturers’ Commission meetings effective and was greatly helped in this by Pierre de Coninck, the commission’s secretary, who was also FISA’s deputy secretary-general. He eventually found it impossible to continue working in FISA’s administration as it then was and left, but when I was elected FISA president he came back as secretary-general and did an outstanding job for the entire 18 years I spent in charge of the sport.
We began holding the meetings at the airport rather than at FISA’s Paris office, thinking that spending a good hour each way on the journey into the city was not an effective use of the time of 30 or so highly paid motor industry managers. We also tightened up the procedure, making sure all discussions were relevant and, wherever possible, documents had been circulated in advance. I gradually earned their trust and at the end of my first year they unanimously proposed me to the World Council. From then on I was re-elected unopposed each year.
I went every year to Japan because of the importance of the Japanese manufacturers in motor sport. These were enjoyable occasions because the meetings were usually high-level and interesting. Also, I adore Japanese food. On more than one occasion, Balestre came too and I mentioned to him that my great-grandfather, Bertram Mitford, had been one of the first British diplomats to visit the Imperial Court when Japan opened up in the mid-19th century. He had subsequently become an admirer of everything Japanese and written a number of books about the country, at least one of which is still on sale in most Japanese bookshops. He had seen the extraordinary change from a Japanese military using bows and arrows in the 1860s to one able to defeat the Russian fleet only 40 years later. Balestre insisted that I mention this to our hosts. I found that a bit embarrassing but he was right, it went down very well.
Although I was not involved in Formula One, I went to the 1989 Japanese Grand Prix to meet representatives of the Japanese car industry, who were always there in force. During the race, Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna collided. Prost could not continue but Senna did and went on to win. Balestre entered the stewards’ room and pressured them into disqualifying Senna, which seemed to me quite wrong and a clear abuse of power. The following year at the same race, Senna deliberately took Prost off on the first corner. Balestre, who was not there this time, attacked Jan Corsmit, the Dutch race director, for not penalising Senna. But Corsmit had seen it as a racing incident so did not pursue the matter. I defended him, telling Balestre in front of the World Council that he should not second-guess the appointed race director.
I was increasingly fed up. I could never get Balestre to make decisions when issues arose and I was very unhappy about his interference with the stewards, particularly in the Senna case. I saw this as political interference with the judiciary, something utterly abhorrent to anyone with respect for the rule of law. And I had not forgotten what he told me about the FIA Court of Appeal during the bugged telephone conversation back in 1982, when he had suggested it was in his pocket. Over the winter of 1990/91 I decided I had to quit.
Then I realised that a fortuitously strange set of circumstances had perhaps given me an opportunity to take a different route. In 1986 Balestre had a triple heart bypass and, because of this, resigned as FISA president but remained president of the FIA. He then changed his mind and asked to be re-elected FISA president in October 1987, so his two presidencies were now out of sync and his four-year mandate as head of the sport was due to finish in 1991. This meant he would have to stand for re-election to his FISA post in 1991, but all other FIA office holders would still have two years to run before its next four-yearly election in 1993. As a result, he would be on his own, isolated without his usual list of cronies, all under an obligation to vote for each other and for him.
Although he would be weaker than in a normal election, Balestre was still considered unbeatable – not least by himself. But he had made a tactical error born of hubris and had left himself vulnerable to a challenger who had nothing to lose. All the various FIA office holders lived in fear of his sanctions – losing their country’s World Championship Rally or Formula One race –
but I was going to quit anyway, so thought I might as well give it a go.
My first requirement was a national sporting authority to put me forward but I knew that the British never would. My own country’s backing was not essential, though – any national motor sport body could put me up. As it happened, Balestre had behaved badly to Ron Frost, one of his former allies, who at the time had been head of the New Zealand Federation. Balestre had taken away the traditional New Zealand round of the World Rally Championship and given it to the United States. This was the same Ron Frost who played a key role in 1980 when we made the short-lived Lausanne Agreement. I arranged to meet him during one of his trips to the UK and told him of my plan. Ron was in favour and spoke to Morrie Chandler, his successor at the federation. This was in June 1991 and Morrie immediately agreed to nominate me when the time came that September. It was a very courageous decision because Balestre was bound to react badly. The election would be held at the FIA General Assembly on 9 October 1991. I began campaigning.
My campaign line was that motor sport needed a new president of FISA. Balestre held three posts – the FIA presidency, the FISA presidency and the presidency of his national motor sport authority, the FFSA. This, I said, was a double conflict of interest. The FISA president had to mediate between national sporting authorities and the FIA president had to deal with difficulties between the FISA and a national authority. It was not possible for one person to do all this without a risk of a conflict of interest. And, that apart, the three jobs were too much for one person now that motor sport had gained such importance worldwide, particularly a man of 70. I also made the obvious points about independence of the stewards and the difficulty of getting any sort of response from Balestre, something from which the national presidents also suffered. But the real strength of my position was a general discontent with him, combined with the fear of retribution should anyone go against him.
