Nicholas Dobson considers the lessons we can learn from Sally Bercow’s mishap
As Irish poet W B Yeats never said, ‘Tweet softly for you tread on my reputation”. This, however, may be prudent advice after Sally Bercow’s controversial tweet which achieved an unwelcome High Court audience with Tugenhadt J.
For (in the wake of intense media speculation about the identity of “a leading Conservative politician from the Thatcher years”, following a 2 November 2012 BBC Newsnight Report which broadcast an allegation by a complainant that he had been abused by such a person when he was a boy living at the Bryn Estyn care home in Wales in the 1970s and 1980s), on 4 November 2012 Ms Bercow (wife of the House of Commons’ speaker) fired off a Tweet reading: “Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *Innocent face*”. In the High Court’s view, this was defamatory (see Lord McAlpine of West Green v Sally Bercow [2013] EWHC 1342 (QB)).
Of defamation, trending & innocent faces
As Tugenhadt J indicated, the applicable law is well established and not in dispute.
