The millionaire Labour donor Dale Vince’s £100,000 libel case against the Daily Mail has been thrown out after a high court judge ruled it did not have a realistic chance of success.
The green energy businessman and Forest Green Rovers chairman claimed the newspaper libelled him in a June 2023 article titled “Labour repays £100,000 to ‘sex harassment’ donor”.
The Daily Mail article was about an entirely separate Labour donor called Davide Serra, who was said to be “a high-flying City financier accused of sex harassment”. The article included a photograph of Vince in his capacity as another high-profile Labour donor who had been the subject of press attention after attending a Just Stop Oil protest in Westminster.
Vince’s lawyers, according to the judgment, accepted that anyone who read the entire article “would appreciate very quickly that he was not the person being accused of sexual harassment”. However, they claimed the Daily Mail had defamed Vince by innuendo, by putting a picture of him under a headline about a Labour donor being accused of sex harassment.
They said an ordinary reader would assume a headline and picture contained accurate information and “they did not need to read any further than to understand what the article was saying”.
Associated Newspapers, the Daily Mail’s parent company, said the case was without merit as case law in England and Wales did not allow a headline and picture to be considered in isolation from the rest of the text. The company said a hypothetical reader, in the eyes of the law, would have read the whole piece and “readers who read only part of an article are not reasonable readers”.
They successfully cited a precedent set in a 1995 legal case involving the News of the World and the actors who played Harold and Madge Bishop in the television soap Neighbours. The tabloid had published an article under the headline “Strewth! What’s Harold up to with our Madge?” accompanied by a photograph seemingly showing the two actors having sex. The text of the article later made it clear that the photographs had been produced by the makers of a “sordid” pornographic video game by superimposing the faces on to graphic images.
The lords who ruled on the case described the News of the World article as “gutter journalism” that had caused great offence. However, they concluded that for the purposes of libel law, it must be assumed that an ordinary person would read beyond the headline and take in all the nuances of an article.
Judge Jaron Lewis concluded that this principle applied to Vince’s case against the Daily Mail, meaning the headline and picture could not be considered in isolation from the rest of the article. As a result, he concluded that Vince’s case was “bound to fail” and could not proceed to trial.
Vince said he would seek to appeal against the judge’s decision in an attempt to overturn the legal precedent, arguing that it did not reflect the reality of how people consume the news.
He said: “A substantial number of people only read headlines and would have thus been given an entirely false impression. As it stands the Daily Mail can get away with this kind of personal smear – I’m trying to change that.”
Vince, who gave millions to Labour in the run-up to the general election, is also suing the rightwing Guido Fawkes blog, the Reform UK MP Richard Tice and the former Conservative mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey over comments they made about Vince’s views on Hamas.
Paul Staines, the editor of Guido Fawkes, has always hosted his blog offshore to minimise legal threats. He has now said he will give up these protections and fight the case.
• This article was amended on 18 July 2024 because an earlier version referred, in one instance, to the Daily Mail headline as being “about a Labour donor being accused of sexual harassment”. To clarify: the reference in the Daily Mail’s headline was to sex harassment.
