Chris Balfe of PitPass has been fairly outspoken in supporting Max Mosley through the sex scandal that has tainted F1 this year. He is entitled to his opinion that the "outing" of Max was a worse sin than the sordid event that made outing possible, but I have found his reasoning questionable, to say the least. Now he has written an article that goes even further in its horror that Mosley's habits should be revealed to the public; it was all a dastardly plot to sully the name of a fine, upstanding citizen, it seems, and we should be grateful that Max has shown us how vulnerable we are as long as MI5 is staffed by a horde of amoral incompetents.
Max Mosley
This is all occasioned by the appearance of an interview with the notorious "Woman E" in the pages of the Mail Online. What upsets Balfe about her story is the claim that it was all her own and her husband's idea; this doesn't suit him as he wants Mosley to find the scoundrel who set the whole thing up. The result is a fine piece of contradictory logic and unlikely conclusions, well stirred and then served up as a sort of stew of moral indignation and scare tactics.
For instance, we are invited to see the woman's quest for money as something so vile that we should be disgusted. The trouble is that, when reading that Woman E and her husband "have loyalty to only one thing, money, and they are driven purely by the desire to get as much of it as possible", I find my mind wandering to as unlikely a subject as Bernie Ecclestone. Never mind that the woman has already explained that they were heavily in debt and that the sting appeared to them as a quick and easy way out of their problem - we must see this as the sole driving force in the couple's life.
I dare say that greed for money is a pretty common failing among many of the population these days and we are all too ready to accept it under the guise of ambition and the will to succeed. Welcome to the real world, Mr Balfe. The plain fact is that Woman E is a product of a society that has abandoned any moral pretensions - she is nothing unusual or special.
We are invited to consider why Mosley was the chosen target, rather than any of the doctors, solicitors and bankers amongst Woman E's clients. Apparently, these are the sort of people who might be far better known to the public than the mere head of the FIA.
Pardon? I cannot think of a single member of those professions who would have any public profile at all - apart, perhaps, from McLaren's lawyer (whose name I have forgotten in the meantime, strangely enough) for the WMSC hearings and what little fame he had was thanks to that obscure sport called Formula One. The likelihood is that the list of Woman E's clients contains none more famous than a certain Mosley, Max.
As for Balfe's suggestion that the husband and his MI5 colleagues withholding of information from their employers is evidence of a lack of morality in that institution, I can only ask what else is new. It is a dirty job and employs those prepared to go beyond normal morality in the execution of their tasks; should we be surprised that Woman E's profession was seen as little more than a joke by such people?
It is a bit much to go on from there to a danger to the security of the state, however. Generally speaking, people are reasonably good at their jobs and I cannot see why MI5 operatives should be any different. Indeed, by Mr Balfe's own logic, a man's private habits have no bearing upon his ability to perform adequately in his work (I would argue that but hey, let's at least get some consistency from Mr Balfe).
The Woman's story is quite plausible, in fact, and Balfe's dismissal of it as lies induced by yet another pay-off extremely unlikely. The fact that she is clearly making money from interviews with the media is no more than one would expect from someone whose means of making a living has been removed. There is no mysterious and malignant entity behind the sting - it was simply a matter of an unscrupulous couple seeing a way out of their financial problems.
And, if we insist on finding a culprit who "set the whole thing up", I suggest we look at Max himself for, without the indulgence of his peculiar tastes, there would have been no scandal possible. If we are pointing fingers at amoral behavior, it seems to me that our Max is as good an example as any.