Taylor v Associated Newspapers Ltd

Summary judgment in a defamation claim is appropriate only where the claimant has no real prospect of success. The application is not a summary trial or mini-trial. The court should assess the merits only so far as necessary to decide whether the claim has sufficient merit to proceed. Where witness evidence permits competing inferences on a material issue, the issue should ordinarily be left for trial. Defamation proceedings may be struck out as an abuse of process where they serve no legitimate purpose of protecting reputation, including compensation for unlawful damage. That jurisdiction is not established merely because the alleged defamatory meaning may differ only narrowly from matters the claimant accepts occurred.

The claimant, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, brought a libel claim against the publisher of the Daily Mail. The article concerned the breakdown of his relationship with a senior colleague following a dispute about a barrister’s bill. The claimant alleged that the article conveyed that he had acted petulantly and unreasonably by wrongly rebuking the colleague in public.

The defendant applied for summary judgment under Civil Procedure Rules 1998, rule 24.2, alternatively seeking to strike out the claim as an abuse of process. It argued that the claimant’s own evidence and admissions substantially established the truth of the defamatory meaning and that the dispute was too narrow to constitute a real and substantial tort. The central questions were whether the claim had a real prospect of success and whether continuation of the proceedings would be an abuse.

1. Summary judgment. The defendant had to show that a reasonable jury properly directed could not fail to conclude that the pleaded meaning was substantially true. The court’s task under rule 24.2 was not to conduct a mini-trial. It was to consider the merits only to the extent necessary to determine whether the claim had sufficient merit to proceed, applying absence of reality rather than probability: Swain v Hillman [2001] 1 All ER 91; Three Rivers D C v The Bank of England (No 3) [2001] 2 All ER 513 HL.
2. The evidence did not compel the conclusion that the claimant had admonished his colleague in front of junior staff, or that the pleaded defamatory meaning was substantially true. The evidence permitted competing inferences about what was said and understood at the meeting. The claimant therefore could not be said to have no real prospect of success.
3. Abuse of process. The governing principle in Jameel (Youssef) v Dow Jones and Co, Inc [2005] QB 946 requires the court to stop defamation proceedings that do not serve the legitimate purpose of protecting reputation, including compensation for unlawful damage. The defendant accepted that the pleaded meaning, considered alone, was sufficiently serious. Its argument depended on the alleged narrow difference between that meaning and the claimant’s admissions.
4. That difference was not sufficiently clear on the witness statements and replies to requests for information. The court could not conclude at that stage that the claimant had behaved in the alleged manner or that seeking vindication was abusive.
5. The applications for summary judgment and strike-out were both dismissed.