A green energy tycoon who has made major donations to Just Stop Oil and the Labour Party has had a libel claim against the publisher of the Daily Mail thrown out by a High Court judge.
Dale Vince had sued Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) over an article which he claimed falsely suggested he was the subject of harassment allegations.
The article, printed in June last year, was headlined “Labour repays £100,000 to ‘sex harassment’ donor” and reported that the party was handing back money to donor Davide Serra, while also referencing fellow donor Mr Vince.
Mr Vince, the founder of energy company Ecotricity, has donated more than £2 million to Labour over the last decade.
He has also donated £340,000 to Just Stop Oil, the activist group that has blocked roads and attacked artworks and monuments.
In 2023, he said he would stop funding Just Stop Oil in favour of backing Labour to get into power, saying the group’s disruptive tactics had become counterproductive to achieving action to tackle climate change.
‘Contradiction’ in case
The article in the Daily Mail related to an employment tribunal in 2022 that heard Mr Serra had made sexist comments to a female colleague which were found to amount to unlawful harassment related to sex.
A hearing in London in February was told that Mr Vince was “seriously defamed” by the article’s headline, image and captions, as they made readers think he was the subject of the allegations.
However, lawyers for ANL opposed the claim, telling the hearing that it would be clear to people reading the whole article that Mr Vince was not the donor being referred to in the headline.
In a ruling on Monday, Judge Jaron Lewis struck out Mr Vince’s claim, stating that it was “not potentially viable” and “bound to fail”.
He said: “There is a contradiction in the claimant’s case. The claimant accepts that the headline and photograph do not accurately summarise the article, although his pleaded case on ‘extrinsic facts’ is that they always do.
“At its highest, it could be said that some readers will have believed that headlines always accurately summarise the underlying article, but this is no more than an opinion and is insufficient to support an innuendo meaning.”
The judge added: “The claim is not potentially viable, and there is no basis for exercising discretion in the claimant’s favour.”