The Telegraph has apologised and paid £40,000 in damages for falsely describing a former aide to Jeremy Corbyn as an “anti-Jewish racist” and part of the “vile antisemitism of Corbyn’s Labour”.
The allegations about Laura Murray, which the Telegraph has accepted were untrue and without basis, were contained in an opinion piece by the former Labour MP and current independent peer Ian Austin, who has also apologised.
Austin, who quit Labour over antisemitism within the party and urged voters to back Boris Johnson at the 2019 general election, wrote the comments about Murray in December 2021 after she was successfully sued for libel by the Countdown presenter Rachel Riley.
Riley, who is Jewish and was a vocal critic of Labour’s handling of antisemitism complaints under Corbyn, was awarded £10,000 after a tweet by Murray was found to have wrongly accused her of suggesting that the then Labour leader “deserved to be violently attacked”.
In the Telegraph’s apology, published on Thursday, it said: “We accept that there was and is no basis to suggest that Ms Murray is antisemitic. On the contrary; the court heard in unchallenged evidence [in the Riley case] that Ms Murray devoted significant time and energy to confronting and challenging antisemitism within the Labour party while she was employed there. The Telegraph and Ian Austin apologise to Ms Murray. We have agreed to pay her substantial damages.”
After Corbyn was hit by eggs thrown by a Brexit supporter during a visit to Finsbury Park mosque in 2019, Riley tweeted a screenshot of a previous tweet by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones about an attack on the former British National party leader Nick Griffin, in which Jones said: “I think sound life advice is, if you don’t want eggs thrown at you, don’t be a Nazi.” She then added “good advice”, along with an emoji of a red rose and an egg.
Later that day, Murray tweeted a response that included the words: “Rachel Riley tweets that Corbyn deserves to be violently attacked because he is a Nazi.”
Mr Justice Nicklin ruled that Murray had misrepresented what Riley had tweeted and that the latter was therefore entitled to damages. However, he rejected Riley’s argument that Murray had been “motivated by any improper purpose”. He added that while Riley’s tweet was not “bad conduct”, it could be viewed as “provocative, even mischievous” and said he had considered that context when deciding the appropriate level of damages.
