TV presenter Rachel Riley has won the latest legal battle against a former aide to Jeremy Corbyn who libelled her in a spat on Twitter.
Laura Murray was ordered to pay £10,000 in damages to the Countdown star in December last year, after sending an accusatory Tweet which called Riley “dangerous” and “stupid”.
The row started when Corbyn, while campaigning as the then-Labour leader, was hit with an egg during a visit to a mosque in March 2019.
Ms Riley referenced an earlier Tweet by leftwing commentator Owen Jones about a similar attack on ex-British National Party leader Nick Griffin, saying: “I think sound life advice is, if you don’t want eggs thrown at you, don’t be a Nazi”, and added the comment “good advice” with an egg and a red rose emoji.
In response, Ms Murray posted on social media: “Today Jeremy Corbyn went to his local mosque for Visit My Mosque Day, and was attacked by a Brexiteer. Rachel Riley tweets that Corbyn deserves to be violently attacked because he is a Nazi. This woman is as dangerous as she is stupid. Nobody should engage with her. Ever.”
Ms Riley sued for libel, arguing her own Tweet had merely been sarcastic and she had not called Mr Corbyn a “Nazi”.
Ms Murray then mounted an appeal against her defeat in the High Court libel trial, but Court of Appeal judges have now (on Thursday, 11 August) dismissed her challenge.
Ms Riley announced her latest victory in a Tweet immediately, saying: “Pleased that all three judges found in my favour that I was libelled by Laura Murray, the original judgment has been upheld and her appeal rejected. Big thanks to my legal team William, Godwin and @MLewisLawyer. Happy to draw a line under this now and move on to happier times.”
In the latest ruling, the judges found Ms Murray’s Tweet “misrepresented” Riley’s post as an “unequivocal public statement that Jeremy Corbyn deserved to be violently attacked, when in truth (it) was ambiguous.”
Lord Justice Warby said Ms Murray “misled the public and its publication was not in the public interest. It was unreasonable for (her) to believe that it was.
“It is necessarily implicit in this reasoning, as it seems to me, that the misrepresentation and misleading were not the result of some permissible oversight but either conscious or at least careless.”
Lord Justice Dingemans added that Riley’s Tweet was “provocative, even mischievous”, but Ms Murray had fallen into error by “reporting only one possible meaning of (the Tweet) as having been tweeted by the claimant”.
After the original libel trial, Mr Justice Nicklin said Riley was “entitled” to “vindication” – but said there had been a “clear element of provocation” in the tweet she had posted.
Ms Murray was stakeholder manager in Mr Corbyn’s office when he was Labour leader, and went on to be the party’s head of complaints, before going into teaching. She argued that what she tweeted was true and reflected her honestly held opinions.
