In 1895, Winston Churchill, as a young officer cadet at Sandhurst aged 21, was falsely accused of having committed an act of “gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type” with another cadet. He promptly sued for defamation and received several hundred pounds in damages, the equivalent of £80,000 today.
People from around the world even travel to London for litigation shopping, as if they were purchasing a luxury handbag
And talking of Oscar Wilde, nearly thirty years later in 1923, Churchill sued Oscar Wilde’s erratic fixation Lord Alfred Douglas for criminal libel – in part because Lord Alfred had accused Winston of being part of a “Jewish conspiracy to manipulate stock exchanges”. (Oh yes, when it comes to anti-Semites nothing ever changes!) Lord Alfred was sentenced to six months imprisonment.
Fast forward to today and our defamation laws are woefully out of date with the morals of our time. True, people can no longer be imprisoned for libel, but these laws today are sometimes used by the very wealthy to silence and destroy their enemies. Harry Mount was absolutely right when he wrote in these pages that one should “Never sue!” But what about when the weapon is being used by the powerful against the weak?
