Labour donor Dale Vince has libel claim against Daily Mail dismissed | Dale Vince

Millionaire Labour donor Dale Vince’s £100,000 libel case against the Daily Mail has been dismissed after a High Court judge ruled it had no realistic chance of success.

The green energy businessman and chairman of Forest Green Rovers claimed the newspaper defamed him in a June 2023 article headlined “Labour pays back £100,000 to donor over ‘sexual harassment’”.

The Daily Mail article focused on another Labour donor, Davide Serra, who was described as a “high-flying City financier accused of sexual harassment”. The article included a photo of Vince in his role as another high-profile Labour donor who had come under media scrutiny after attending a Just Stop Oil protest in Westminster.

Vince’s lawyers admitted that anyone reading the article in full “would very quickly realise that he was not the person accused of sexual harassment”. However, they claimed that the Daily Mail had defamed Vince by innuendo, by putting a picture of him under a headline about a Labour donor accused of sexual harassment.

They said that an ordinary reader would assume that a headline and image contain accurate information and “need not read further than to understand what the article is saying.”

Associated Newspapers, the parent company of the Daily Mail, said the case was without merit because case law in England and Wales does not allow a headline and image to be considered in isolation from the rest of the text. The company said a hypothetical reader would, in the eyes of the law, have read the article in its entirety and that “readers who read only part of an article are not reasonable readers”.

They successfully cited a precedent set in 1995 in a court case involving the News of the World newspaper and the actors who played Harold and Madge Bishop in the television soap opera Neighbours. The tabloid had published an article under the headline “Strewth! What’s Harold doing with our Madge?” accompanied by a photograph apparently showing the two actors having sex. The text of the article later clarified that the photographs had been produced by the makers of a “sordid” pornographic video game by superimposing faces onto explicit images.

The Lords who ruled on the case described the News of the World article as “street journalism” which had caused serious offence. However, they concluded that for the purposes of defamation law, it must be assumed that an ordinary person will read beyond the headline and grasp all the nuances of an article.

Judge Jaron Lewis concluded that this principle applied to Vince’s case against the Daily Mail, meaning that the headline and photo could not be considered in isolation from the rest of the article. As a result, he concluded that Vince’s case was “doomed to fail” and could not proceed to court.

Vince said he would seek to appeal the judge’s ruling in an attempt to overturn the legal precedent, arguing that it did not reflect the reality of how people consume news.

He said: “A huge number of people only read the headlines and therefore got the completely wrong impression. As things stand, the Daily Mail can get away with this kind of personal smear. I’m trying to change that.”

Vince, who donated millions to Labour in the run-up to the general election, is also suing the right-wing Guido Fawkes blog, British Reform MP Richard Tice and former Conservative mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey over comments they made about Vince’s views on Hamas.

Paul Staines, the editor of Guido Fawkes, has always hosted his blog abroad to minimise legal risks. He has now announced that he will waive those protections and fight the case.