Howard Jacobson: Which is more depraved: Nazi role-playing in sex games or the horrors of motor sport?

I might need help with this one. "Yes, psychiatric help," I hear the unsympathetic saying, but that's not the help I'm talking about. I mean help in the explanation sense, as in explain to me why a man shouldn't indulge in a bit of retro-Nazi sado-masochistic role-play in the quiet of a house of ill-repute in leafy Chelsea when the fancy takes him, provided no one gets seriously hurt in the process – other than, one hopes for his sake, himself.

Related articles

• James Lawton: Formula One should take a reality pit stop before claiming pole position on morality

I know it's disgusting, but isn't that the whole point of fantasy? You don't descend into the sewers of your nature, forking out £2,500 on a posse of prostitutes in fancy dress, in order to behave decorously. Decorous you can do above ground and for far less. However barbaric his fantasies, knowing how to distinguish them from reality is, in my view, the mark of a civilised man. And playing at Nazis sure beats being one.

That it's strictly private down there in the cellarage one should no longer have to argue. Among the prices we pay for liberalism, however, is intrusiveness. Witness the Arts Council's latest ruse. Nothing that any Arts Council does is ever anything but stupid – it goes with the oxymoronic nature of the brief: Arts and Council, for God's sake – but its proposal to ask everyone applying for a grant to reveal their sexual orientation adds impertinence to folly. All, needless to say, in the name of fostering diversity – which is another oxymoron. You don't "foster" diversity.

We have brought this on our ourselves. In a climate of loose-tongued confessionals, where whatever we don't own up to we are outed for, the Arts Council can think it's perfectly acceptable to enquire what we do with our bodies before it will give us money to make art. Only a matter of time before it wants to know how many retro-Nazi sado-masochistic fantasy events we attend in a year. And woe betide us, should we be applying for a grant to fund an over-60s dance troupe in Elstree, if they discover we attend too many. Or too few.

Max Mosley is, of course, the occasion for these reflections on the place of Nazi fantasias in a man's life, though he is currently denying what the News of the World has accused him of. Go to YouTube, if time is hanging heavy on your hands, and you will find a person bearing a remarkable resemblance to Mr Mosley taking part in an orgy of some sort – allowing that an orgy, even in Chelsea, is only very rarely orgiastic. But that it is a specifically Nazi orgy Mr Mosley vehemently denies.

The only reason he is to be heard speaking German, he insists, is that two of the five prostitutes he hired – at least one of whom is seen in a striped uniform reminiscent of those worn by prisoners in the camps – are German speakers. In other words, what we are watching is not depravity but good manners and a cosmopolitan education.

I would prefer him to have owned up to depravity and told the News of the World to go hang. But he has his job as president of FIA to think about. Not recognising what those letters stood for at first I took them to be an acronym either for the Fitness Institute of Australia or the International Federation of Actors, either of which one could imagine encouraging the sort of workshop Mr Mosley paid good money to attend in Chelsea. But it turns out that his FIA is the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, a body charged, among other things, with overseeing a variety of motorsports including Formula One. Forgive me if I express surprise that anyone should consider motor racing a sport. My surprise apart, it would appear that it is Mr Mosley's presidency of the FIA, as much as his family connections, that explains the News of The World's interest in him. The question on everybody's lips – is such a man fit to run Formula One?

You might as well ask if such a man is fit to run hell. On the evidence of his YouTube smackathon at least, I'd say that Mr Mosley isn't anything like depraved enough to run either. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Formula One dedicated to the promotion of the sale of killer cigarettes, the wanton spillage of expensive champagne, the encouraging of easily excited rich young men (and that is not an oxymoron) in their pursuit of acceleration, exhaust noise and extruded showgirls?

I lived in central, grand-prix Melbourne for a time and had the cars circling my apartment. Unbearable, the mindless engine-whine. Better a million times to have had Mr Mosley in his striped prison-camp pyjamas flogging and being flogged outside my window. Better morally, better aesthetically, cleaner, wittier, less hysterical, sweeter smelling, quieter.

And yes, far less inhumane, because it doesn't dehumanise you to look into your soul and call the thing of darkness you discover there your own, whereas no person with a grain of humanity in him should want to be responsible for the mechanistic horrors of the racing car, the noise a screeching engine makes, the murderous robotic fury of metal and velocity.

And no, I didn't inadvertently use the word "wittier" of Max Mosley's Nazi make-believe. He might not have read the literature, but philosophers of the erotic believe the highly scripted ceremonials of sado-masochism to be essentially critical and mocking in their intention. Certainly, if I were a Nazi I wouldn't appreciate Mosley's travesty of my beliefs and uniform. I put it to you, anyway, that it is not impossible he is avenging himself, now upon his Führer-fetishising father Oswald, now upon his Goebbels-glorifying mother Diana, once a Mitford "gel".

Lady Diana Mosley's biographer, Anne de Courcy, guesses that Max's Nazi romp in Chelsea would have shocked her deeply. "Even though she admired Hitler, she deplored any form or depiction of violence and cruelty." Drink deep of that. The monstrous hypocrisy of the genteel. Get the whips out more often, is my advice to Max. The more you parody the violence your parents were in awe of, the less of a sucker you'll be for it in reality yourself.

Accept this interpretation or not, no Jewish organisation should waste its energies being outraged by this tame Third Reich pantomime. Nazi iconography is not in the sole possession of the Jews. And even if it were, it is better that someone plays about with Nazi cruelties for whatever private reason than that he says they never happened. You cannot, after all, simultaneously enact the Holocaust and deny it.

More from Howard Jacobson