Was S&M fan Max Mosley set up?

As Max Mosley wins his landmark privacy action against the News of the World - and £60,000 in damages - today's Independent reports that the Sunday scandal sheet may well have been "used" by forces within Formula 1 as a means to oust Mosley as head of the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), motorsport’s regulatory body.

Why? The theory goes like this: before the News of the World sting, Mosley, 68, son of the wartime fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, was in the process of imposing tighter rules on safety and fuel efficiency for Formula 1 cars; he was also seeking to give the FIA the power to ban powerful individuals from racing events if they were caught cheating. The previous rules expired on December 31 last year and Mosley was attempting to negotiate a new agreement when he was warned that he was being tailed by private investigators.

A senior figure in the industry, who has worked closely with Mosley, told the paper he was "99 per cent certain" that the investigation and the News of the World's exposure of Mosley's taste for sadomasochism were linked. Said the unnamed source: "It's just an extraordinary coincidence and it would have been tremendously convenient for a lot of people if Max had been ousted. In fact he wasn't, because the FIA stood by him, but if he had been, it would have been a brilliant coup." (Continued below)

All very interesting, but there’s another tantalising twist to the story – the involvement of Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police commissioner, in the Mosley saga. It seems that when Mosley got wind of the fact that a newspaper was looking into his private life, he hired Lord Stevens’s security firm Quest to help him - not to investigate the allegations (although he did do that later), but to advise him on how to ensure no one followed him when he went to the Chelsea basement for the orgy.