Max Mosley has no right to airbrush his past

Not for the first time, the public willingness to forget all about Max Mosley is frustrated by Max Mosley's determination to be forgotten about. His latest legal action against Google, for not having suppressed pictures of what the News of the World falsely alleged to be a "Nazi themed" sex party, has duly renewed interest in records of that historic event and in its host, Mr Mosley, who may now be less well known as the son of the fascist demagogue, Sir Oswald Mosley.

As links proliferated on Twitter, the BBC contributed a feature about the Streisand effect, speculating, and inevitably confirming, that Mosley's attempts would be counterproductive. "Is there a risk," it asked, "that Mosley will cause himself more embarrassment by bringing a fairly old and perhaps half-forgotten news story back to people's attention?" There is – and given that Mr Mosley must have anticipated it, continual replaying of his story may even be his goal, since any news report might be a chance to rehearse his conviction that his fixtures with groups of paid sex workers were a private matter, with no bearing on the presidency of the International Automobile Federation. "If you're not doing harm to anybody," he told Leveson, who was delicate enough not to mention Mrs Mosley, "you should be allowed to do whatever you like."

Mosley is now a noted privacy campaigner, one of Hacked Off's celebrity counterparts to Eric Schmidt of Google, whose cavalier approach to street recording and data exploitation has done much to alienate a public he could now use on his side. It was he who observed: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Mosley was barely that persuasive for the pro-censorship side when he said: "The really dangerous things are the search engines." He told Leveson: "If somebody were to stop the search engines producing the material, the actual sites don't really matter because without a search engine nobody will find it – it would be just a few friends and the person who posts it."

And it turns out, in a judgment already exploited by Mr Mosley and around 100,000 others, the EU's Court of Justice has felt his pain. The new "right to be forgotten" or, more accurately, "right to impede investigation", compels search engines to erase links for no better reason than that their subjects believe them to be "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant".

Yet how it must rankle with Mr Mosley that the decision falls, in the first place, to Mr Schmidt's newly recruited army of obliterators, to which the court has delegated frontline erasure, now reportedly being approved in around 50% of cases. Typically of this hazily framed judgment, it is not clear what tests these operatives apply so as to identify the historically or morally irrelevant. How do they assess the purging of incidents – one thinks, for example, of extravagant investment in sadistic sex parties – that might, if accessible, deter an internet dater?

Although, as a Lords select committee has just pointed out in an admirable demolition of the judgment: "It is wrong in principle to leave to search engines the task of deciding many thousands of individual cases against criteria as vague as 'particular reasons, such as the role played by the data subject in public life'." As for David Cameron, his spokesman noted that the judgment did not seem to separate "the issue of information that is wrong, and correction of factually inaccurate information, as distinct from what some have characterised as seeking to hide factually correct information".

In fact, the judgment actively invites concealment of the truth, so as to preserve reputations of all kinds, although, as with defamation law, the powerful stand to get the most out of it. For one senior lawyer, the former Law Society chief Robert Sayer, his public designation of one rival as "a dog turd" plainly has no bearing on his current work at Sayer Moore & Co solicitors. The UK information commissioner, one Christopher Graham, has assured the BBC that respecters of history and truth have nothing, however, to fear: "All this talk about rewriting history and airbrushing embarrassing bits from your past – this is nonsense. It's not going to happen."

Alas, a firm defence of the record, in defiance of forgetting, might be a tricky operation for a government known to have withheld email exchanges (from Leveson) and smothered unwelcome reports, and for a party chairman, Grant Shapps, who recently obliterated whole websites created by one of his alter egos, the dashing entrepreneur "Michael Green". The Tories have long enjoyed the suppression of a Bullingdon Club photograph in which its senior politicians were captured in attitudes of telling, yet perfectly legal hauteur. There is at least the excuse, in that case, that the students knew no better, any more than the rash juveniles still leaving trails of incriminating boasts and selfies and on whose interests the EU might more usefully have focused. In a more ambitious act of obliteration, almost worthy of Milan Kundera's masterpiece The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the party has also purged a decade of speeches from its website, including, the Voice of Russia gleefully reported, one in which Cameron rhapsodised about the democratising power of the web: "By making more information available to more people, you are giving them more power."

If the subsequent vanishing of Cameron's "contract between the Conservative party and you" does not really justify another invocation of Kundera – "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" – it should certainly facilitate civilian amnesia about his 2010 advice, should he fail, for instance, to deliver the right to sack errant politicians: "Vote us out in five years' time." If he succeeds, the right to be forgotten could hardly be more welcome to endangered MPs.

For the public, on the other hand, the apparent invincibility in politics as elsewhere of any number of flakes, cheats, sockpuppets, sexual predators and the unimaginable numbers who sought friendship with Murdoch's staffers surely indicates a more urgent need for reminders, knots in handkerchiefs, for the most productive possible internet searches. It's more memory we need, not less. Any more forgetful and people might seriously need reminding, for instance, how soon, after Werritty, Liam Fox became eligible for redemption, or which pious Labour grandee once availed himself of a young diary secretary; or, indeed, that Max Mosley was once active in his father's Union Movement,an episode, unlike the orgy pictures, he has never attempted to suppress.

Max Mosley's response in Observer Letters here

• This article was amended on 8 August 2014 to remove references to the Camping and Caravanning Club. The club is an associate member of the International Automobile Federation, once presided over by Max Mosley, but he has never occupied a role in the club's management or influenced its aims or strategy.