Roebuck on Mosley

"My term of office ends in October 2005, and I have a big decision to take fairly soon, to go on or to stop...One should never stay too long, and I am very sensitive to that." (Max Mosley, July 2003).

Separate remarks in the past few days from Autosport's Mark Hughes, and The Times's Edward Gorman, seem to imply that the Mosley camp is in the throes of constructing some sort of legal case against FOTA, on the basis that their efforts to unseat him as President of the FIA constitute a vendetta. It is an approach to governance which would, no doubt, find favour with Robert Mugabe.

One hopes that Mosley is merely attempting to give himself some bargaining chips over the coming months; some leverage, as it were, which will help him to install esrtwhile Ferrari team-principal, Jean Todt, as his successor, come October.

Meanwhile, the August issue of Motorsport magazine contains Nigel Roebuck's epitaph on Mosley, and one feels that Nigel has been waiting not a little time to deliver these words:

So, as Mosley had required the head of Ron Dennis in April, now his own is - at last - on a FOTA platter and it is not impossible that Ron, together with virtually everyone else in F1, has raised a glass or two.

Seventy or so years ago the celebrated diarist James Lees-Milne wrote this: 'It became clear he was a man of overweening egotism. He did not know the meaning of humility. He brooked no argument, would accept no advice. He was overbearing and over-confident. He had in him the stuff of which zealots are made. He was madly in love with his own words. It could be a terrible day, I fancied, when they ran away with him, and took the wrong turning.'

Lees-Milne was writing of Oswald Mosley. On recent evidence it would seem the apple didn't fall far from the tree.