How appalled should we be by Max Mosley's Nazi-tinged cavortings with five prostitutes? The son of Oswald and the equally unpleasant and fascistly inclined Diana has been exposed by the tabloids as, their words, “a secret sado-masochistic sex pervert” (the word “secret” is key: most sado-masochistic sex perverts, you see, play out their dark fantasies in public).

Anyway, one of the prostitutes that Mosley had paid to dress up as someone who looks like a spoof 1950s prison convict captured the five-hour orgy on her camera phone, then sold it to the newspapers. Anyone who wants to know more about the insuperable subconscious drives of the rich and powerful can now download a video recording of the 67-year-old head of Formula One naked, manacled, wrinkled and chained up on a bed. In what I believe constitutes a new twist on the standard S&M dungeon scenario, Mosley speaks German to his consorts: “Eins! Zwei! Drei! Fier! Fünf! Sechs!” he commands in a passable accent while flagellating a brunette with an aide pornographique.

So we could leave the man alone and concede that the only victim of this story is Mosley himself. If we were in a generous mood, we could even decide to find the whole thing hugely comical, if a touch Benny Hill, and concede that P.J. O'Rourke was right when he said: “No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.” But, of course, in this country of enthusiastic dogging and high street sex shops, of unblinking acceptance of internet pornography and lively swinging parties, that would be wildly inappropriate. As Bernie Ecclestone so elegantly phrased it: “If Max was in bed with two hookers, they'd say ‘good for you' or something like that. But this, as it is, people find repulsive. I think that's the problem.” Oh, the sweet irony. Not two years ago Bernie complained that motor-racing was suffering a chronic lack of sordidity. “There are not enough sex scandals,” he said ruefully. Now he's got his sex scandal, but, of course, it's the wrong sort.

I can see that Mosley will have to go. I can see that any shrink would have a field day. But it's interesting that among car manufacturers involved in Formula One there was particular disgust in Germany, where BMW and Mercedes-Benz are based, “over the Nazi element in Mr Mosley's conduct”. This seems odd. One assumes that Mosley didn't set off for the Chelsea Embankment dungeon with a firm mind to thoroughly humiliate those arrogant German car makers. Perhaps it's a copyright issue. German sado-masochistic fantasies for German people?

BMW, we now know, employed forced labour and concentration camp inmates during the Second World War, and Goering and Goebbels each drove a Mercedes-Benz 540K. And as for prostitute scandals, only a year ago it was revealed that the top brass at Volkswagen were spending several thousand euros of company money having orgies and flying prostitutes to and from Brazil. We don't know if the boys from VW dressed up as Churchill, but only because nobody was paid to record the events for posterity (and avid consumption by the general public). These are Stirling Moss's rather contradictory thoughts on the subject: “I suppose what goes on behind closed doors is his business but when a thing comes out like this...it's an absolute shocker.” True that the revelations were an absolute shocker and that Mosley's transgressions went on behind closed doors. But there's a third, unacknowledged, truth: the general public would be profoundly shocked at almost everything that goes on behind closed doors if, as it seems increasingly to wish, it had access to some kind of brain-scan sex detector. Why can't James Dyson hurry up and make one?

Some people would apparently be up for it. “This is sick and depraved,” Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, says. “For anyone to be in such a position of influence and power beggars belief. I am absolutely appalled.” So what do we do, Karen? CCTV cameras in every bedroom and whorehouse in the land? Set up a regulatory body to govern sexual impulse, ensure that people have the right sort of sex lives, the right sort of thoughts concerning sex? Set up a committee: gather together the editors of Cosmopolitan, that woman who runs Ann Summers, the department for health and safety and the author of Belle de Jour, who romanticises prostitution in just the right matter-of-fact and yet philosophically and psychologically barren way. Throw in some survivors of tabloid sex stings - Jamie Theakston maybe. Ignore the complexities of human sexuality. Ignore that sex is to a large extent inexplicable: like describing a painting or a dream, words fail. Condemn. Blur the gap between public and private space.

Stephen Smith, director of the Holocaust Centre, also, ridiculously, got dragged into the “debate”: “As Mr Mosley has condemned the racism in motor sport he should live up to the standards he sets. This is an insult to millions of victims, survivors and their families. He should apologise. He should resign from the sport.” Resign, possibly: but “should live up to the standards” he sets in public life in front of five probably drug-addicted prostitutes? And where's the case for a racism charge? Perhaps Max Mosley can be persuaded to describe piecemeal what thoughts led him over the years to seek out sado-masochistic German sex, but I expect for most people that would be too utterly weird and complex. Besides, we have our own moral enigmas to sort out: do we think the person who is exposed in a sex scandal is any less moral or capable than the person who keeps it all in his head? And what about our own prurient and addictive fascination with all things sexually abhorrent - the explosion in sexually explicit Misery Literature, for example. What are we to make of that? Instead, the Daily Mail asked its readers yesterday: “Is such behaviour in your DNA?” Sounds like something our supposedly least favourite Austrian fascist might have said.

Carol Høgel and the vanity of philanthropy

Yesterday my colleague Magnus Linklater wrote elegantly about the death of philanthropy in the UK and now I want to write about the perils of inherited money. We're both referring to a millionairess called Carol Høgel, who is moving from Scotland, where she has lived for 24 years, back to her native United States. She feels umbraged by the forthcoming imposition of the non-dom tax on her private purse and by the “destructively spiteful, philistine attitude of the Government” who have failed properly to acknowledge her massive contribution to the arts, which amounts to around £20 million. In the States, she says, “an individual with involvement in, and charitable contributions to, visual arts and classical music is valued, not punished”.

Here's Andrew Carnegie on money: “I would as soon leave my son a curse as the almighty dollar.” Høgel's father left her an almighty fortune and almighty fortunes do strange things to the human brain: they can separate you from other people and inhibit self-reflection. Høgel has boasted in the past that somehow “we have inherited this giving gene. Some people's hobbies are buying expensive race horses. Our hobby is giving.”

We have to be grateful to philanthropists for saving our institutions from philistine arts ministers, but we hope too that they acknowledge somewhere that signing a cheque for half a million pounds to save the Edinburgh Festival can elicit the same kind of thrill in some people that signing a cheque for a shiny new yacht elicits in others. Who wouldn't want to do it? In an inverted way, philanthropy is a different kind of pleasure seeking and vanity. Giving in its most pure form expects nothing in return, neither eternal gratitude nor special exemption from tax laws. Carnegie again: “Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.” Høgel wanted special treatment and when she didn't get it she pulled the plug. In a fit of irritation, she has abandoned us to the philistines.

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