The judgment in the Twitter libel case between Lord McAlpine and Sally Bercow has been published, with the judge explaining fully his reasoning for finding against Bercow.
The House of Commons' Speaker's wife Bercow had tweeted "Why is Lord McAlpine Trending? *innocent face*" at the height of speculation over who an alleged high-profile paedophile alluded to in a Newsnight report really was.
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The Newsnight report was subsequently found to be false.
The case, though, offered an opportunity to flesh out social-media libel case-law. The key passages were paragraphs 81-87:
"In my judgement followers of the Defendant on Twitter probably are very largely made up of people who share her interest in politics and current affairs. They probably are people who, by 4 November, knew these elements of the story told in the Newsnight report: that Mr Messham had been abused at a children's home in Wales some 20 years or so before, that the man he identified as his abuser was a leading Conservative politician from that time, and that the decision of the BBC not to name the person Mr Messham identified was the subject of public controversy.
"In my judgement some followers of the Defendant probably did also have prior knowledge of the Claimant as a leading Conservative politician of those years. Some followers probably did remember him in that capacity, and some others probably had sufficient interest in politics to have read about him. 56,000 is a substantial number of people, although I do not find that all of those read the Tweet.
"However, in my judgement it was not necessary for a reader of the Tweet to have had any prior knowledge of the Claimant as a leading politician of the Thatcher years in order for them reasonably to have linked the Tweet naming him with what I have found they knew about the allegations in the Newsnight report. This is because the Tweet identified him by his title, Lord McAlpine, that is to say, as a peer of the realm. It is common knowledge that peers nowadays are generally people who have held prominent positions in public life, in many cases in politics, including as members of the House of Lords. The Tweet asked why the named Lord was trending, in circumstances where (1) he was not otherwise in the public eye on 4 November 2012 and (2) there was much speculation as to the identity of an unnamed politician who had been prominent some 20 years ago.
"In my judgement the reasonable reader would understand the words "innocent face" as being insincere and ironical. There is no sensible reason for including those words in the Tweet if they are to be taken as meaning that the Defendant simply wants to know the answer to a factual question.
"The Defendant does not have any burden of proof in the issue I have to decide. She does not have to offer an alternative explanation of why a peer, whose name and career is known to few members of the public today, might have been trending on 4 November 2012 without her knowing why he was trending. But where the Defendant is telling her followers that she does not know why he is trending, and there is no alternative explanation for why this particular peer was being named in the tweets which produce the Trend, then it is reasonable to infer that he is trending because he fits the description of the unnamed abuser. I find the reader would infer that. The reader would reasonably infer that the Defendant had provided the last piece in the jigsaw.
"That leads to the question: what is the level of seriousness of the allegation that the Claimant fits the description of the unnamed abuser?
"The Newsnight report was not a report of an investigation by the police (or by anyone else). Nor do the media reports suggest that they were reporting on an investigation. The Newsnight report, and all the other reports are of the allegations of a man who complained he was sexually abused. It is true that some reports also included that the unnamed person who is accused of the crime has vehemently denied it. But what is reported is the accusation. The Tweet is linked to those reports, in that it adds a name that was not in the reports themselves. So it is by implication a repetition of the accusation with the addition of the name which had previously been omitted."
