Judgment was handed down in the High Court on 15 July 2024 following a strike out application by the Defendant in the case of Dale Vince v Associated Newspapers Limited ([2024] EWHC 1806 (KB)). HHJ Lewis granted the application and struck out the claim.
The Claimant, Mr Vince OBE, is a prominent businessman, political donor, and environmental campaigner. He sued in libel over an article concerning him and a separate Labour Party donor about whom allegations had been made of sex-based harassment. The article, subsequently amended, bore the headline “Labour repays £100,000 to ‘sex harassment’ donor”, with two photographs of Mr Vince beneath, captioned “Road blockers: Dale Vince in London yesterday, and circled as he holds up traffic with Just Stop Oil”. On this basis, Mr Vince claimed that the article conveyed the innuendo, meaning that he was the donor about whom such allegations had been made (the innuendo being based on alleged facts about the way some readers assume a headline and picture caption accurately summarise an article).
The Defendant applied successfully to strike out Mr Vince’s claim on the basis that the article could not convey the meaning he contended, as when read in full, it made clear that the sex harassment allegations related only to the other donor. The Claimant conceded that if so read in its entirety, the article was not defamatory and the claim would fail. HHJ Lewis held that the rule from the case of Charleston v News Group Newspapers ([1995] 2 AC 65) would require that the whole text of the article be taken into account when determining the meaning of the article, whether innuendo, as claimed, or “natural and ordinary”. It followed that the claim fell to be struck out.
5RB’s Alex Marzec acted for the Defendant Associated Newspapers Limited, instructed by Reynolds Porter Chamberlain LLP. 5RB’s Godwin Busuttil acted for the Claimant, instructed by Brett Wilson LLP.
A full case report will be released in due course.
The judgment is available here.