-Caveat Lector-
THE TIMES December 03, 2004
Galloway jubilant after court awards him £150,000 damages against the Telegraph By Michael Horsnell
Vindicated: George Galloway was found to be a "truthful and compelling witness" by judge
GEORGE GALLOWAY, the expelled Labour MP, was awarded £150,000 damages from The Daily Telegraph yesterday over “seriously defamatory” allegations that he was a secretly paid agent of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
The newspaper was also ordered to pay the £1.2 million legal costs of the case and refused permission to appeal.
But Mr Justice Eady imposed a stay on payment of damages and costs when the Telegraph announced that it would instead seek leave directly from the Court of Appeal to challenge his judgment.
The maverick anti-war MP for Glasgow Kelvin could not conceal a smile as the judge gave his ruling at the High Court in a reserved judgment following the week-long libel trial last month.
In a case with important implications for the freedom of the press, the judge said that the newspaper was not protected by privilege nor by the defence of fair comment. The libel trial followed a series of articles in April last year in which Mr Galloway, 50, was alleged to have been receiving £375,000 a year from the Iraqi regime. These had been based on documents discovered by David Blair, a Telegraph reporter, in the ruins of the Foreign Ministry in Baghdad. Asked later whether he planned to return to Iraq to investigate the origin of the allegedly bogus documents, Mr Galloway appeared to detect a plot to kill him off. He said, sarcastically: “For the moment the situation in Baghdad is such that were I to go there, I am sure the friends of The Daily Telegraph who are in control of Iraq would like to arrange an accident for me whilst there, so I am not yet able to.” The judge found that the articles defaming the MP, who was greeted by roars of approval from supporters outside the Royal Courts of Justice, also conveyed to “reasonable and fair-minded readers” the allegations that:
he diverted money from the oil-for-food programme, depriving the Iraqi people, whose interests he had claimed to represent, of food and medicine; he probably used the Mariam Appeal, which he had founded, as a front for personal enrichment; he acted in a manner that was “tantamount to treason”. The MP, who founded the political party Respect after his expulsion from the Labour Party last year, said later that he had risked financial and political ruin to obtain vindication. “All those people, the old regime of The Daily Telegraph — Lord Black, Barbara Amiel, Charles Moore — were amongst the chief trumpeters for the disasterous decision to go to war with Iraq,” he said. “In aid of their case they prayed many things which turned out to be wholly false, bogus, counterfeit, forged and utterly wrong. “This judicial caning holds them to account for a very small part of the great offence that they have caused, because although I have suffered as a result of the lies they wrote about me, I haven’t suffered anything like as much as the people of Iraq or the integrity of our country as a result of the decisions made, for which they are the main bugle blowers.” He added: “So, the Telegraph has been held to account. What now for the Government, because the truth is, this was done to me because I was a leader of the anti-war movement. “They tried to establish that I was an enemy of the State and that the anti-war movement was the enemy within. But, in fact, the real enemies of the State are those who have led us into this disaster in Iraq.” Mr Galloway said: “I am glad and somewhat humbled to discover that there is at least one corner of the English field which remains uncorrupted and independent and that corner is in this courtroom.” The judge said he was “obliged to compensate Mr Galloway in respect of the publications and the aggravated features of the defendants’ subsequent conduct, and to make an award for the purposes of restoring his reputation”. He added: “I do not think those purposes would be achieved by any award less than £150,000.” Telegraph Group Limited denied libel, claiming that it was responsible journalism and in the public interest for it to publish the contents of the documents. The judge said that he found Mr Galloway “a truthful and compelling witness”. It was no part of the newspaper’s case to suggest that any of the allegations were true, he said, or even that there were reasonable grounds to suspect they were true. “It was the defendants’ primary case that their coverage was no more than ‘neutral reportage’ of the documents . . . but the nature, content and tone of their coverage cannot be so described.” He added that, although Mr Galloway was interviewed by telephone on the afternoon of April 21, 2003, he was not given an opportunity to read the documents beforehand, and neither were they read to him. “He did not therefore have a fair or reasonable opportunity to make inquiries or meaningful comment upon them before they were published.” Neil Darbyshire, the paper’s executive editor, said after the hearing: “We are naturally disappointed by this judgment, which we believe is a blow to the principle of freedom of expression in this country. “If, as we understand the court to have held, English law offers no real protection to newspapers that publish documents which raise such important questions about the conduct of an elected MP, then freedom of expression is an illusion.”
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