Eye of the storm

In 1969 Paul Foot asked if I’d be interested in being Private Eye’s lawyer. The Eye had recently suffered a well-publicised defeat in the courts at the hands of Lord Russell of Liverpool, author of the best-seller The Scourge of the Swastika. It had put them in dire financial straits. Rightly or wrongly, they held their lawyer responsible and were looking for a replacement.

Inexperienced but cheap

I was—as Paul well knew—virtually a novice in the field. In fact, I had never previously conducted a libel case to trial. My only advantages were that I was young, keen, and cheap. Richard Ingrams, the editor, seemed content to hire me without probing my qualifications or lack of them. He may have been relieved that someone was willing to take the poisoned chalice.

For the next 15 years I occupied the role of Sue, Grabbitt and Runne, the fictitious —or pseudonymous—legal vultures of the Eye’s mythical proprietor, Lord Gnome.

My initial inexperience of libel law did not prove a disadvantage. Nor—contrary to the belief encouraged by a coterie of specialist libel lawyers who have built up a lucrative cottage industry—was it a difficult area of law. The key skill is negotiation, which is distinct from specialised knowledge of the subject.

My job was to extricate the Eye from a succession of libel claims, many of which were justified, at least in strictly legal terms. A small magazine which seeks to expose the hypocrisies of people in public life is highly vulnerable in a legal system which favours claimants. In the 70s and 80s the law was even more heavily weighted in their favour than it is today.

The Eye survived in those years because litigants were restrained in their financial demands by the fear that they would drive the Eye into insolvency. Destroying a popular institution could be damaging. Worse still, they might be out of pocket, denied damages and their own legal costs. It was not my responsibility to allay these fears.

But it was also important to make it clear that we were prepared to fight when we needed to. Readers were willing to help with donations and we were backed by excellent barristers who enjoyed working for the Eye and whose careers continued to prosper. Ronald Waterhouse and James Comyn became High Court judges and Desmond Browne chairman of the Bar. John Mortimer was also on hand when needed.

Regular targets

Some claimants were not deterred, particularly those represented by the Eye’s most prominent legal bugbear, the late Peter Carter-Ruck, notorious for the deviousness and greed which underlay his emollient manner. “Carter-Fuck” was a regular Eye target. He greatly enjoyed the street credibility it gave him among his colleagues.

It was a strategic achievement that few cases in my time got as far as a full-scale trial. In two of them Carter-Ruck acted for the same client: Observer journalist Nora Beloff. An Auberon Waugh piece stated that one “Nora Ballsoff” went to bed with Harold Wilson “but nothing improper occurred”. We dismissed her demand for damages on the basis that no reader could possibly take the joke seriously. But we were sunk by a stroke of genius on the part of Carter-Ruck. He called as witness the old and frail writer (author of The Charge of the Light Brigade) Cecil Woodham-Smith, walking with a Zimmer frame and laboriously carried into the witness box. In quavering tones she described the shock she felt at the vile attack on her impeccably respectable friend. The judge, a devout Catholic and utterly humourless, summed up with deep solemnity and the jury awarded Ms Beloff £3,000.

Retribution soon came in the second case. The Eye had published notes by Beloff of an interview with a cabinet minister which she had accidentally left in a taxi. Carter-Ruck advised her to sue for breach of copyright. Our defence was public interest. During the trial, we learned we had a better argument. The Observer, owner of the copyright, had failed to assign it to her. She had no right to sue and her case collapsed. This elementary slip-up by Carter-Ruck neatly obliterated the pain of our earlier defeat.

Goldsmith saga

The culmination of my time as Private Eye’s solicitor was the legendary Goldsmith saga. Sir James Goldsmith was a quick-tempered bully unused to being thwarted. Inflamed by the Eye’s decision to contest his libel claims he poured money into a series of legal manoeuvres which were ultimately counter-productive but potentially very costly to the Eye.

He issued over 70 separate writs against the Eye’s distributors and newsagents, which Lord Denning (though not his fellow judges, who outvoted him) held to be an abuse of process. Goldsmith made a bizarre attempt to have Ingrams and a colleague imprisoned for criminal libel. Happily, before the criminal trial Goldsmith found his plan to buy the Daily Express frustrated by the refusal of its journalists to work for him while his assault on the Eye continued. A settlement was rapidly agreed. The Eye made a less than grovelling apology and paid a modest contribution towards Goldsmith’s legal costs. Goldsmith never achieved his ambition to own the Express.

Moving on

By 1984 other responsibilities were burdening me: it was time for me to move on. It had been a joy to work with people who devoted their considerable talents to exposing hypocrisy, self-importance and, often, serious corruption, always with irrepressible wit and style.