the times | Tuesday December 21 2021 25
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senter was entitled to vindication
but said her initial tweet had been
“mischievous” and there was a
“clear element of provocation” on
her part. Riley said that she was
being sarcastic, did not call Corbyn
a Nazi and Murray’s tweet caused
serious harm to her reputation.
Justice Nicklin, who oversawLaura
Murray, a
former aide
to Jeremy
Corbyn, said in
a tweet that
Rachel Riley was
“as dangerous as
she is stupid”Rachel Riley, the Count-
down presenter, has been
awarded £10,000 in dama-
ges after a Twitter dispute
with a former aide to Jer-
emy Corbyn, despite a judge
saying that she had “pro-
voked” the defendant.
The television presenter
and Laura Murray, a manag-
er in Corbyn’s office when he
was Labour leader, posted
tweets after the MP was hit
with an egg while visiting a
mosque in March 2019. Riley initially
posted a screenshot of a tweet by
Owen Jones, a columnist at The
Guardian, about an attack on Nick
Griffin, the former British
National Party leader, that said:
“I think sound life advice is, if
you don’t want eggs thrown at
you, don’t be a Nazi.” Riley
wrote: “Good advice.”
Murray tweeted: “To-
day Jeremy Corbyn went
to his local mosque for Visit
My Mosque Day, and was
attacked by a Brexiteer.
Rachel Riley tweets that
Corbyn deserves to be
violently attacked
because he is a Nazi. This
woman is as dangerous as
she is stupid.”
Riley, 35, who is on
maternity leave from
Countdown, complained
about Murray’s tweet. The
judge ruled that the pre-
TV star wins libel case despite ‘provocation’
Peter Chappell the case in the High Court in May, had
ruled that Murray’s tweet was defama-
tory. He concluded that it should be
taken to mean that she was accusing
Riley of saying that Corbyn “deserved
to be violently attacked” and so she had
shown herself to be a “dangerous and
stupid person” who “risked inciting un-
lawful violence”.
The judge had been asked to consider
whether serious harm was caused to
Riley’s reputation and whether Murray
had a defence of truth, honest opinion
or public interest.
“This case is unusual,” he said. “It
turns, largely, on two tweets: the ‘good
advice’ tweet and the defendant’s tweet.
I have found that the publication of the
defendant’s tweet has caused serious
harm to the claimant’s reputation.
There is a clear element of provocation
in the ‘good advice’ tweet. The claimant
can hardly be surprised — and she can
hardly complain — that the good ad-
vice tweet provoked the reaction it did.”
Riley had told the judge that she was
Jewish and had a “hatred of antisemi-
tism”. She said she thought that
Labour under Corbyn was “foster-
ing antisemitism”.
Murray told the judge that her
job involved her working with the
Jewish community to “try to find
solutions to the problem of anti-
semitism which was becoming evi-
dent within parts of the Labour
Party membership”.
Riley said in a tweet that she was
“extremely pleased to have won my
libel case”. She added: “This has been
a very draining process and I’m
relieved to finally have vindication.”
t