A green energy tycoon who made large donations to Just Stop Oil and the Labour Party has had a libel claim against the publisher of the Daily Mail dismissed by a High Court judge.
Dale Vince had sued Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) over an article he said wrongly suggested he was the subject of harassment allegations.
The article, published in June last year, was headlined “Labour repays £100,000 to donor over ‘sexual harassment'” and reported that the party was returning money to donor Davide Serra, while referring to fellow donor Mr Vince.
Mr Vince, founder of energy company Ecotricity, has donated more than £2m to Labour over the past decade.
He also donated £340,000 to Just Stop Oil, the activist group which has blocked roads and attacked artworks and monuments.
In 2023, he said he would stop funding Just Stop Oil and support Labor for power, saying the group’s disruptive tactics had become counterproductive in achieving action on climate change.
“Contradiction” in the case
The Daily Mail article referred to an employment tribunal in 2022 which heard that Mr Serra had made sexist comments to a colleague which were found to constitute unlawful gender-related harassment.
At a hearing in London in February, Mr Vince was told he had been “seriously defamed” by the article’s headline, image and captions because they led readers to believe he was the subject of the allegations.
However, ANL lawyers objected to this claim, saying at the hearing that it would be clear to people reading the article in full that Mr Vince was not the donor mentioned in the headline.
In a ruling on Monday, Judge Jaron Lewis dismissed Mr Vince’s claim, saying it was “not potentially viable” and “doomed to failure”.
He said: “There is a contradiction in the complainant’s case. The complainant acknowledges that the headline and photograph do not accurately summarise the article, although his case on ‘extrinsic facts’ is that this is always the case.
“One could at most say that some readers believed that headlines always accurately summarized the underlying article, but that is nothing more than an opinion and is not sufficient to support an insinuation.”
The judge added: “The application is not potentially viable and there is no basis for exercising discretion in favour of the applicant.”
