A legal fiction? Pt 2

In Pt 1 of this series it was noted that one—in theory, the most reasonable—interpretation of a statement may attract the defence of truth for the purposes of defamation law, yet not eclipse entirely the prospect of liability in the tort of malicious falsehood (see “A legal fiction? Pt 1”, 165 NLJ 7680, p 13). This begs the question of what implications, if any, the availability of this defence is likely to have for a successful malicious falsehood claim based upon a secondary meaning within a given statement. No such issue arose in Cruddas v Calvert [2015] EWCA Civ 171, [2015] All ER (D) 184 (Mar), because, on the facts of that case, the claimant was unable to show malice on the part of the defendant journalists and there was, therefore, no prospect of a successful malicious falsehood claim. It was true that certain readers might well foreseeably understand the defendant journalists to have been implying that the claimant