Jo Glanville writes passionately in today’s Guardian about what Lord Hoffman called “the blackmailing effect” of our libel laws. She bemoans the no win, no fee regime and laments the fact that, according to a recent study by the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University, the cost of libel litigation in England and Wales is 140 times the average elsewhere in Europe. As she puts it, the present system has turned “the libel courts into casinos”.
Unfortunately, all this has been said since time immemorial. Indeed, so hackneyed do the arguments over libel appear to be – on both sides – that Blade sometimes wonders whether this grandiose bickering has assumed the form of a curious English ritual. Talking of which, when confronted with the barrage of cliche that libel, like no other area of law, seems destined to provoke, Blade wishes he could travel in a time machine to a society which settled its disputes by means of a good old-fashioned duel. After all, it was good enough for Joseph Conrad, so why not?
But despite his weariness when it comes to hearing the same tired old phrases trotted out (next up: “London is the libel capital of the world”), Blade is, at the end of the day, an Article 10 man. As such, he too is in mournful mood. The cause is a conversation he had with his literary agent recently. She told Blade that it was becoming more and more difficult to place “tricky” manuscripts, i.e., those with some degree of legal risk. “Publishers don’t want to touch them,” she said. “They get scared off by the prospect of fighting a huge legal battle.” She even said that, as an agent, she was increasingly familiar with the libel lawyers’ letter before action. “If I get a lawyer’s letter, that’s usually it,” she confessed. “The MS is returned to the author.”
But libel isn’t all bad. It exists for a purpose. It is blatantly wrong for a newspaper such as the Express to publish a series of falsehoods about Kate and Gerry McCann, and it is right that those so vilified have a means of redress. But maybe – just maybe – it’s time for the claimant libel lawyers to highlight the good they do, rather than stand on the back foot and simply rebut the many attacks made on them. In other words, the ancient tort of libel might just need bit of trendy 21st century PR.
Pictured: a dragonfly of the family Libellulidae found throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. With thanks to Martin Werker.
For a certain poet, an unspoiled stretch of seaside was like “the holy hush there is in the land on Christmas morning. The roads fairly empty, the sky almost free of aeroplanes and you begin to hear and see and smell once more”.
But who uttered these lines?
(It’s a Monday, and this is your starter for 10 – and yes, we’re fresh to the metropolis, from a coastal sojourn.)
The following words appeared in a Times article in 2003, about the paper’s recently departed Head of Legal, Alastair Brett. They’ve been doing the rounds in the wake of Brett’s sudden exit last week, though without attribution. Who, we wonder, wrote them? Two suspects present themselves – our own occasional scribe, Alex Wade, and Dominic Carman, son of the late, great George (an old mucker of Brett’s). Or was someone else the author? Whatever: the fact remains that Brett was a fearless, tenacious and excellent newspaper lawyer, a man whose commitment to press freedom coursed through every vein in his body. We don’t know the precise reasons for his departure, but he will be missed.
“[He] is known for his impassioned commitment to press freedom – so impassioned that he has been described as “certifiably insane”. Capable of an intimidatory snarl or two, and prepared to be stubborn, Brett is far from mad. He is erudite, charming (so the ladies say), and not known for sitting on the fence. If his sanity has, tongue firmly in cheek, been questioned, one thing not open to doubt is that Brett epitomises the old school Fleet Street lawyer”.
Pictured: Fleet Street - not the same as it used to be.
A curious observation leaps at us from Roy Greenslade’s piece about whether Conrad Black, shortly to roam the high-class hotels of the world again as a free man, will return to the UK and carry out his threat to sue his biographer, Tom Bower, for libel:
I somehow doubt that he would have the appetite, or the funds, to pursue a libel action, but Black marches to the sound of his own drummer, so he might just do that. Even if he did, my money would still be on Bower winning.
Hang on, Roy – what about suing via a no win, no fee deal? Funds or no funds, a CFA would see Conrad through – though maybe he’ll remember what happened to the last press baron who sued Bower. Anyone for Richard Desmond’s curious dalliance with libel?
Pictured: the kind of place in which Conrad Black may be spotted (if not at the Royal Courts of Justice).
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A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.
Πλάτων, Greek philosopher.