While there he proved himself a chip off the old block. As president of the Oxford Union in 1961, he campaigned on a platform of "free speech for fascists" when an invitation for his father to address the Union was opposed. That year Mosley canvassed for his father's violent, right-wing Union Movement in Manchester.
As Robert J Taylor, a former branch chairman of the UM, which campaigned to repatriate blacks, said: "Max was very much a Mosleyite, one of the boys." So involved was Mosley that in 1962 he found himself in court charged with threatening behaviour after punching anti-fascist demonstrators at a meeting in London. He was acquitted when he told the court he could "not be expected to stand idly by" as his father was jostled and pushed.