We keep to our theme of rich men today. In this case, Max Mosley who has recently demonstrated why the relative independence of even the relatively wealthy can be socially and culturally innovative.

Mr. Mosley's story is well known. Son of former British pre-war fascist leader Oswald Mosley and with a Hitler-admiring mother, Mr. Mosley admits to a long fascination with and involvement in sado-masochistic role-playing.

Ah-ha, I hear you gasp! Clearly a bad egg! But not so, dear reader. Mr. Mosley was 'exposed' in a bumptious and self-regarding newspaper 'sting' where the perpetrators truly believed that they had the right to invade the private life of a man, cast vicious aspersions and then take the moral high ground.

In fact, they had not reckoned with someone who declined to take the usual route of the politician or businessman exposed as having 'secret vices' - a ritual submission before the great god of yellow journalism which has ruled our culture since the days of Lord Northcliffe.

No, Mr. Mosley proved of sterner stuff. He pointed out that what he did in his private life was his own affair and that the newspaper had fabricated the context of his actions, constructing a disgraceful Nazi back story that was not evidenced and was designed to will implicitly the sins of the father on the son.

But he did not merely fight his corner to save his career. He decided, a true post-modern hero, to expose the newspaper, the News of the World, through the law courts and in the court of public opinion. Much whining about freedom of the Press, a last refuge of many a journalistic scoundrel, ensued.

On July 24th, he won £60,000 in court against the News of the World and full vindication. But he did not stop there. He continued to pursue the principle of the case - that a man or woman should be able to have privacy where a matter was not one of true rather than prurient public interest.

On October 20th, he gave an interview to the Guardian which could be deemed courageous precisely because, having been exposed, he exposed himself further to create a context for his campaign of vindication. Others would have walked away with one court victory and the game could just go on.

Mosley wants to close the game down. What he has to say shames British journalism, the same journalism that will take a dossier from the Government without question with one hand, while seeking to undermine a man's life with falsehoods and imputation with the other.

Why is this interview so important culturally - possibly politically one day? Above all, he explains without embarrassment what his sado-masochistic tendencies actually involve, certainly no harm to others, and how he had come to terms with his true nature long before the reported events.

He had made certain judgements, rightly or wrongly, to keep them in some sort of box where they disturbed no-one but himself and other practitioners. Rightly or wrongly, his decision protected his family from trying to understand what is personal and private and almost impossible to explain conventionally.

He made clear his respect for the girls involved. He did not try to scuttle and make them seem dirty with some abject apology and mealy-mouthed appeal to family values. He simply asserted his right and their right and his family's rights, and the rights of others like himself, to a private life.

He turned the moral tables on the tabloid press by indicating that their prurience had no rights attached. They had appointed themselves judge and juryand unilaterally over-turned a carefully finessed and self-negotiated management between a person and their environment.

Perhaps he should have discussed and explained his preferences to his wife but not all wives or husbands can cope with the complexity of their partners. It was his clearly considered judgement that it was for him to assess the situation and not some reptile with a mind to increased newspaper sales.

Interestingly even the interviewer, the sympathetic and apparently sophisticated Angelique Chrisafis, could not resist starting her interview with another ritual obeisance to English sexual inadequacy and seaside humour with silly jokes about what boots to wear.

What Mosley was saying was pretty basic stuff. He was hard wired in his brain for certain behaviours and rather than get tormented about them, he was going to be true to himself and find a way to express himself without causing health and safety problems or distressing others.

It is as if the English Middle Classes are incapable of removing themselves from the legacy of the Victorian era - a world where sex is always 'naughty', an occasion for shame and embarrassment, where the real issues, sound interpersonal relations, health and safety, are always ignored.

He was also saying, with some courage, in relation to the ridiculous and equally prurient interest in his fascist forebears, that, in a very real sense, 'that was then and this is now'. He was and is not a neo-Nazi and a youthful campaigning stint for the fascists was that of a dutiful son not a hardened anti-semite.

This is important. People change. Circumstances change. Times change. For the media to label and stereotype by implication someone because of events when they were young or living under other conditions feeds into our cultural prejudices against context or, in other words, for stupidity.

Our political and media classes are fundamentally stupid precisely because they think in absolutes and never in conditionals. They feel they must give the public simple messages. They treat the public like fools and so they get fools.

This man might be judged on his job but it is not for the public to judge him on his private life. It is for him, as for all, to negotiate his own personal reality with his 'significant others'.

The worst disrespect of the News of the World and all newspapers that invade privacy is not to the immediate target, often a strong person who can hold their own as Mr. Mosley has done, but to the dependents and relationships of that target.

The cruelty of tabloids is not so much to the target as to the wives, lovers, children, the women it implies are prostitutes but are not, their families and associates - and to all those who lie awake at night fearing that they will be next in an appalling form of moral terrorism that reminds one of OGPU in its prime.

True investigative journalism is dead in Britain, buried under a mound of commercial greed that refuses to fund investigation into real acts against the public interest in favour of a theatre of cruelty that has lasted decades, closer to the circuses of Ancient Rome than the nobility of purpose claimed by most journalists.

The best critics of a system are often insiders. If Max Mosley is the revolutionary pointing out the true moral depravity of this system, the chief ideologist, witting or not, is Nick Davies, whose Flat Earth News is a devastating account of how the one thing you do not get out of the system is reliable information.

Can it get better? Yes, it probably can but only if three changes take place. The first is a law on privacy that covers the personal conduct of persons within the law without protecting corruption and malfeasance in public or corporate life or the cruel abuse or exploitation of anyone.

The second is the possible collapse in this recession of the culture of print-based editorial journalism in favour of new business models that use the internet to slash costs. This may allow a fresh style of investigative journalism to bring public servants and special interests to account.

The third is down to us - a revolutionary will to remove moralistic sniggering about consensual private choices, recognise human complexity and create a climate in which partners can talk freely and negotiate solutions to what troubles them or makes them whole.

Instead of sniggering and prurience, a culture of honesty, discretion, respect and compassion is likely to allow people to respond to their own hardwiring - non-sexual, gay, vanilla, polyamorous, fetishistic, coded by a religion freely chosen from Hasidic to Taoist - and negotiate their own relationships.

In short, Max Mosley should be seen as a quietly heroic figure, not right in every respect, but a fighter for human rights against the commercialisation, not of private consensual sex, but of sexuality as something that has been turned into an object of use or a commodity.

This is the attitude to sex that turns a blind eye to trafficked women in brothels and sells products through half-naked flesh but which cannot bring itself to appreciate the positive role of taboo and the erotic in culture or can hound or embarrass a politician because he or she is just 'different'.

And the political point? Only that fear of the media turns our political class in on itself, forces it to cling to its own kind, creates the sort of group-think and tribal loyalty that deters innovative thinking and is at the root of the failures of policy that have led to the curent economic crisis.

A fearless political class is one that can take on all the special interests, including those self-appointed a-moral sports of culture in the media, and stand up directly for the people's interest. Any political class that is craven to the media is one that cannot represent us.

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