Broadcaster Rachel Riley
(Picture: PA Archive)TV presenter Rachel Riley has won the latest legal battle against a former aide to Jeremy Corbyn who libelled her in spat on Twitter.
Laura Murray was ordered to pay £10,000 in damages to the Countdown host in December last year, after sending an accusatory Tweet which called Riley “dangerous” and “stupid”.
The row started when Corbyn, as Labour leader, was hit with an egg during a visit to a mosque in March 2019.
Ms Riley dug up an earlier Tweet by leftwing commentator Owen Jones about a similar attack on ex-British National Party Nick Griffin, saying: “I think sound life advice is, if you don’t want eggs thrown at you, don’t be a Nazi”, and added the comment “good advice” with an egg and a red rose emoji.
In response, Ms Murray posted on social media: “Today Jeremy Corbyn went to his local mosque for Visit My Mosque Day, and was attacked by a Brexiteer. Rachel Riley tweets that Corbyn deserves to be violently attacked because he is a Nazi. This woman is as dangerous as she is stupid. Nobody should engage with her. Ever.”
The TV star sued for libel, arguing her Tweet had been sarcastic and she had not called Mr Corbyn a ‘Nazi.
Ms Murray mounted an appeal against her defeat in the High Court libel trial, but Court of Appeal judges on Thursday dismissed her challenge.
The judges found Ms Murray’s Tweet “misrepresented” Riley’s post as an “unequivocal public statement that Jeremy Corbyn deserved to be violently attacked, when in truth (it) was ambiguous.”
Lord Justice Warby said Ms Murray “misled the public and its publication was not in the public interest. It was unreasonable for (her) to believe that it was.
“It is necessarily implicit in this reasoning, as it seems to me, that the misrepresentation and misleading were not the result of some permissible oversight but either conscious or at least careless.”
Lord Justice Dingemans added that Riley’s Tweet was “provocative, even mischievous”, but Ms Murray had fallen into error by “reporting only one possible meaning of (the Tweet) as having been tweeted by the claimant”.
After the original libel trial, Mr Justice Nicklin said Riley was “entitled” to “vindication” – but said there had been a “clear element of provocation” in the tweet she had posted.
Ms Murray was stakeholder manager in Mr Corbyn’s office when he was Labour leader, and went on to be the party’s head of complaints, before going into teaching. She argued that what she tweeted was true and reflected her honestly held opinions.
In a separate legal case, Mr Corbyn is being sued by Richard Millett over a 2018 interview with Andrew Marr, when he discussed a 2013 comment about “Zionists” who “don’t understand English irony”.
Asked to explain the comment, Mr Corbyn talked about a “very, very abusive” incident involving the Palestinian Ambassador, which Mr Millett said libelled him as he was known to be involved in that incident.
A High Court judge has ruled that Mr Corbyn’s words were statements of fact and defamatory, in a preliminary ruling in the libel battle.
Corbyn lost an appeal to that decision, and was today refused permission to appeal to the Supreme Court.
