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As Max Mosley sat in Room 13 of the High Court in London, he was described variously as looking arrogant, calm and implacable. But, really, who was concentrating on his face when all anyone could think about was his bottom? His poor, shaved, smacked, raw, bleeding and bandaged bottom. Max Mosley's bum was the white elephant in that courtroom.

Britain is in the grip of the most sensational dirty-talking trial since Lady Chatterley's publishers fought for her right to roll in the woods with Mellors. (The updated version: “Would you let your wife or your servants be spanked by this man?”) Max Mosley's name, in two short weeks, has become a part of speech. One woman looks at another's stilettos in a bar and says, “Ooh, you could Mosley someone with those things.” One of Britain's most famous newscasters makes a joke, moments before going on air, about how he might look like Mosley but he goes “to different brothels.”

This is the summer of le vice anglais. (How rich of the French to provide that term for spanking, considering that they gave the world Pauline Réage, who gave the world The Story of O.) Mosley, of course, is the Formula One boss who's suing the News of the World tabloid for invading his privacy when the paper ran a story, complete with grainy, buttock-smacking photos, saying he'd been involved in a Sick Nazi Orgy With Five Hookers.

Mosley, 68, doesn't deny that he likes a good spanking, to the point where he spends $150,000 a year keeping his bottom warm; it's the Nazi bit that's got him livid. He is the son of British fascist leader Oswald Mosley and society beauty Diana Mitford, who were married in Joseph Goebbels's parlour. Nobody, he testified, wanted to be reminded of his parents in the bedroom (or, even worse, the dungeon).

It is commonly believed that British men and spanking go together like Marmite and toast. In his diaries, the great theatre critic Kenneth Tynan – as spank-happy as they come – wrote about the huge public interest in the trial of a bottom-paddling Tory politician, the Lord Mayor of Chelsea and Kensington. “The enormous publicity, which reflects the passionate English interest in the subject, cannot but be a good thing: It brings spanking out into the open.”

That was in 1974. The world of S&M may have peeled back its leather hood a little, but it's still the subject of behind-the-hands giggling, to judge by how many papers sent their reporters to dungeons this past week. No one can keep a straight face, it seems: When Mosley's lawyer held up a tarty “prisoner” costume, the dominatrix in the witness box burst out laughing and said, “It suits you!”

Tynan's diaries are fascinating for the way he picks over his compulsion, not with shame but glee. “How infinitely more varied in its excitements is sado-mas than straight sex.… And the games one can play! Really, there is no sport to touch it: It is not just a nocturnal relaxation, it is a way of life.”

Like Mosley, Tynan went outside his marriage to satisfy his craving – one of the trial's unanswered mysteries is how Mosley managed to indulge his fantasies without his wife of 45 years ever finding out. Ian Fleming, James Bond's creator, was more fortunate: He had a willing submissive in his wife, Ann, who was also a crack hand with the whip.

“It's very lonely not to be beaten and shouted at every five minutes,” she wrote to him while on a trip to New York. “I have no bruises and I am basking in flattery. I must be perverse to want you to whip me and contradict me.…” Later, she wrote that she wanted to be “put in your bed with a raw cowhide whip in my hand so as I can keep you well-behaved for 40 years.…”

In those days, you didn't wander around the yacht club telling people that you liked a bit of the old paddle at the end of the day. Fleming had a fictional outlet, though: The Bond books are shot through with S&M fantasies, not least in Casino Royale's endless torture scene, where the malignant Le Chiffre – with his “soft, fat smile” – beats a naked Bond till he faints.

Le Chiffre used a carpet-beater in the book. (In the 2006 film, Daniel Craig faces a knotted rope.) According to a recent biography, John Mortimer, creator of the Rumpole books, liked a little hairbrush-on-bottom action. It's as old as the hills, this business, but it's still remarkably good for selling papers.

Men like Tynan and Fleming would have been discreet about their hankering for spanking; Mosley says his tendencies would have remained secret too had The News of the World not posted the video of him being whipped, barked at in German and “inspected for lice” on its website (3.5 million hits and counting – the video, that is.) Mosley claims his privacy has been invaded, and if he wins, it will almost certainly change the way British papers write about the wealthy and powerful.

Until a judgment is handed down next week, Mosley can comfort himself with the thought that he's carrying on a proud British tradition of pleasure and punishment. In the words of Woman D – an unfortunately banal pseudonym for the stern mistress in the Luftwaffe jacket – “It is not everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoy it.”