Max Mosley slams into Paul Dacre

Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre's opposition to the idea of introducing new privacy laws, which have followed Max Mosley's infamous legal action against a Sunday tabloid, has been greeted with a stinging rebuke from the man himself.

In today's Guardian, Mosley (pictured), the head of Formula 1 who was wrongly accused of participating in a Nazi-themed sado-maschistic orgy with five call girls (he only denied the Nazi part), writes: "He may be pompous, self-satisfied and, with his wonderfully twee ideas about sex, a bit of a prude, but the sinister aspect of Paul Dacre's speech to the Society of Editors on Sunday is the sheer intellectual dishonesty of his comments about the law on privacy."

Mosley, the son of the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, goes on to defend the judge who presided over his privacy case, Justice David Eady, who awarded him £60,000 in damages against the paper who ran the story, the News of the World. "So why this thoroughly disingenuous attack on a high court judge? During his speech, Dacre let the real reason slip. Without scandal, tabloid sales will decline. To keep this squalid industry afloat, an unrestricted right to publicise the sex lives of others is necessary, so the judiciary must be silenced."

He adds: "To Dacre, the private pursuit of S&M among like-minded adult enthusiasts is "unimaginable depravity". His misplaced moral outrage reminds me of the prejudices once targeted at the gay community, not least by the Daily Mail.

"In the end Dacre is just a bully. He delights in attacking those who cannot hit back. In open debate, which he always avoids, the intellectual and moral demolition of his position would be swift and complete. In the meantime, his championing of the Sun and the News of the World as society's moral guardians reveals the bankruptcy of his position."