Max Mosley is the man unable to escape his own past, although he has spent a lifetime trying. The country knows that the 77-year-old is a child of fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley and, while his father may have died in 1980, what his son did to support him in the early 1960s lingers still.

Mosley went to Formula One and spent four decades there, ultimately becoming one of its bosses as head of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA). It was a place where, he claims, nobody asked much about what he had done before.

But this week the stopwatch wound back. A legal dispute with the Daily Mail, that began when Mosley sent a legal letter demanding that the newspaper stopped referring to his sadomasochistic orgy in 2008, and his relationship with the tiny, officially recognised press regulator Impress, has resulted in the Mail unearthing uncomfortable truths about his involvement in his father’s fascist, anti-immigration Union Movement in the early 60s. At the time, Mosley helped run a racist byelection campaign, was caught on camera throwing a punch at protesters opposed to his father and supported apartheid in South Africa.

Mosley was, one can fairly conclude, racist then. Is he now? For his part, Mosley thinks not; he believes he is the victim of a media smear campaign because he has campaigned on press standards and media law since he won a privacy lawsuit against the News of the World. Mosley’s attempts to defend himself have so far failed. An extraordinary interview with Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News, interrogating his far-right past, descended almost immediately into an argument. As she quizzed him about whether he held racist views, his failure to apologise left viewers wondering how much his opinions had changed.

Yet, at first sight, on a snowy London morning, Mosley appears unconcerned. He opens the door of his Chelsea townhouse cheerfully, calmly ushering me into a ground floor study with views over a communal garden and rows of books about motor racing and the media behind him. It turns out this is where Mosley mostly lives – on his own – while his wife, Jean, lives in a second townhouse nearby. She doesn’t like having him around all day, demanding things such as coffee, he says, and he prefers to remain in a comfortable, but somewhat soulless, property that has more the feeling of a well-maintained hotel than a crumbs-on-the-sofa home.

There is no publicist or lawyer present (although Mosley trained as the latter) and he is quite prepared to answer every question put to him over an hour and a half or so. We start by talking about his fascist father. Mosley says he was “very much under his influence” as a young man and was “convinced by what he said to me”, which he uses to justify much of what follows. He says he became involved in the Union Movement when he moved to London in 1956, aged 16, and “I used to go to the headquarters sometimes”. In the 1959 general election, by which time Max had gone to Oxford to read physics, Sir Oswald stood as a candidate in North Kensington, coming fourth with 7.5% of the vote. Mosley says: “I did the best I could to help, knocking on doors, asking: ‘Will you vote?’”

When asked about his father’s views, Mosley says that at the time “if called upon, I’d defend them”. Except it went further than that. Didn’t he support apartheid? “Yes,” he begins. “I thought separating the races was the only way to avoid massive bloodshed in South Africa, which everybody was predicting, and I think would have happened had it not been for Mandela. It seemed to me logical if they were in conflict to separate them. The only question was: who got what?” It is, frankly, difficult to listen to this, but there is more. Is it true he went to a violent Union Movement counter-demonstration that disrupted a silent vigil held in Trafalgar Square for victims of the Sharpeville massacre in 1961? “I don’t know why I went to that … there was this feeling that they were the opposition.” But, he says, he changed his mind about South Africa long ago: “What was good was the prediction was wrong.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mosley with Walter Hesketh in 1961. Photograph: PA

More is revealed by the byelection leaflet from 1961, where the young Mosley acted as the election agent for Walter Hesketh in Manchester Moss Side. “My father offered it to me as a holiday job,” he says. At the time, Mosley had left Oxford and was in the early stages of qualifying for the bar, but the demands of Gray’s Inn were not onerous. He says he worked on the campaign daily: “My main job each morning was to meet the press.”

Looking back on it, Mosley says, “the main issue there [in the campaign] was Commonwealth immigration”. I show him the racist leaflet, published by Mosley as part of Hesketh’s election campaign and reprinted in that day’s Guardian. It said: “There is no medical check on immigration. Tuberculosis, VD and other terrible diseases like leprosy are on the increase,” before concluding “coloured immigration threatens your children’s health”. But when shown a copy of the leaflet on Channel 4 News earlier this week, Mosley queried whether the leaflet was even real. But he has changed his mind since: “I am quite convinced it is genuine.” Did he write it? “I certainly didn’t.” He tries to move the conversation on. “[The leaflet] is quite close to the sort of thing that the Daily Mail publishes today; it never stops coming out with immigrants are bringing in TB/HIV and all sorts of things. For them to complain is a bit hypocritical.” Hang on … so did the leaflet represent his opinions at the time? He says he was “surprised he had anything to do with it” – which seems impossible to believe. Then he admits he supported repatriation because, in his view, it is “perfectly legitimate to offer immigrants financial inducements to go home”. Extraordinarily, Mosley hangs on to the idea that the leaflet’s statements could be accurate, even if they should not have been published. “Just to be very clear, there was no medical check on immigrants. That might be true. It might be true that leprosy and other terrible diseases were on the increase.” I struggle to believe this is his answer. What about the offensive last part, about the impact on public health? Mosley opts for a factual, not a moral, answer: “Well, I wouldn’t have said that. Because the chance of children mixing with a person with TB is obviously minimal.”

Wouldn’t it be easier to admit that the views expressed in the leaflet are abhorrent and reject them? In the comfort of his study, with a slim Apple desktop computer on his desk, Mosley finally, briefly, raises his voice. “Hang on a minute – what view?” The view in the leaflet. “What view are you saying is abhorrent?” I am forced to read from the leaflet. He still won’t apologise. “The view that coloured immigration threatens your children’s health; certainly, I find that offensive. The factual things, if they be facts, it’s either true or it’s false. It may be true, just like what the Daily Mail writes.”

One thing Mosley does not want the Daily Mail to write about is the infamous orgy, which was secretly filmed by the News of the World and splashed on its front page in 2008. The then motor-sport boss said he knew he would sue the morning it was published, but first he had to tell his wife. He says he had been paying women to participate in such sex parties for 45 years, but she knew nothing of it. “At first, she thought it [the article] was a joke. It was the sort of thing I might do. Then …” he trails off. “It was sad.” The lawsuit did succeed, however, and Mosley won £60,000 in damages in a case, which included a crucial judgment concluding that the reports by the Sunday newspaper were not in the public interest.

“That sort of sex is for enthusiasts,” Mosley says. The conversation becomes rapidly toe-curling, but Mosley seems happy to discuss it, which is particularly curious given his legal demand that the Mail and three other newspapers never refer to it, claiming that it would be illegal to do so under the Data Protection Act.

So will Mosley send a legal letter to the Guardian despite this discussion? “What you are doing is serious journalism. You are making an attempt to learn the facts of a controversial situation. I consider that serious journalism. Deploying what happened at that party as pure prejudice to undermine me is contrary to the Data Protection Act.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Max Mosley … ‘Just to be very clear, there was no medical check on immigrants.’ Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian

At the trial, Mosley was asked about the existence of the now-revealed 1961 pamphlet; a part of the News of the World’s case was that its reporting was in the public interest. When asked about the pamphlet in court, Mosley said he could not remember it and challenged the other side to produce it, but they could not. Now that it has been found, the question is whether Mosley perjured himself.

The Mail has sent a file to the Crown Prosecution Service so that it can be retroactively considered by police. What does Mosley think of that? “That is just a silly stunt. Anybody who has even done O-level law, knows that perjury consists of saying something that you either think is untrue or that you do not honestly believe to be true.” What does he think about the Daily Mail’s editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre? Has he met him? “I’ve never met Paul Dacre. I’ve very much wanted to. Whenever I get invited to a university to discuss these things or debate, I say: ‘If you can get Dacre on the other side, I’m coming.’” As for Impress, the tiny press regulator, he insists he does not control it; he instead has provided £3.8m over four years to fund a trust that funds the body.

Some, not surprisingly, have concluded that Mosley has become toxic. The Labour party said on Wednesday it would not take future donations from him, although its deputy leader, Tom Watson, will keep the £500,000 Mosley provided to fund his office in the period after he was first elected. Mosley says Watson is “both honest and courageous”, partly for his role in exposing the phone-hacking scandal.

The two have spoken this week and Mosley is confident Watson won’t return the donation. “We were talking about how completely disgraceful it is that the press are running this campaign, that it is entirely intended to intimidate people who are calling for independent press regulation.” He hopes there will be a Leveson inquiry part two, which would cover elements not dealt with in part one because of ongoing criminal trials, although, as we are discussing it, Theresa May rules one out, a decision that Mosley calls “a disgrace”.

Max Mosley’s half-forgotten far-right past catches up with him Read more

Mosley says he left the Union Movement in 1963, before going into motor racing. But as our conversation draws to a close, the question still remains: is he racist? “I don’t think I’ve ever been a racist. I know you can say that was a racist leaflet, but I’ve never had a problem about different races. When I got to be head of the FIA, race and gender were what mattered least – what matters is ability.”

It has not been, to be honest, the most convincing of conversations. Yet, Mosley sounds surprised when asked if he should simply apologise for what he once did. “Who do you apologise to?” he says at first, then: “If there was a West Indian immigrant here in this room, who said to me: ‘That really upset me,’ I would apologise to them profusely. Because that is the individual. But apologising to the world at large seems to me kind of pointless.”

• This article was amended on 27 March 2018 to describe Impress as the officially recognised press regulator rather than the state-sanctioned press regulator.

