Arron Banks, the pugnacious Brexiteer, has lost his claim for defamation against Carole Cadwalladr, the darling of the Brexit-loathing bourgeoisie. Banks brought the action in relation to two public utterances made by Ms Cadwalladr. First, her TED talk of 2019, in which she said:
‘And I’m not even going to go into the lies that Arron Banks has told about his covert relationship with the Russian government.’
And second, a tweet she posted, also in 2019, in which she linked to her TED talk and said:
‘If you haven’t watched it please do. I say he lied about his contact with the Russian govt. Because he did.’
We don’t need a judge to tell us it was wrong for members of the political class and the media elite to depict the electorate as a dumb, vile horde
Mrs Justice Steyn ruled that the TED talk was indeed defamatory of Banks, who has always strongly denied the allegations against him, but she accepted Ms Cadwalladr’s ‘public interest’ defence.
Then it got weirder.
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