The Eye has it?
Anthony Holden
For the past several weeks, a food millionaire called Sir James Goldsmith has been trying to buy one newspaper and jail the editor of another. To him the two ends were not contradictory. To those whose newspapers he is trying to buy, they were. Beaverbrook executives kept trying to drive this into his skull, desperate to convert their knight (Wilson vintage) into one in shining armour before being seen to be bought by him. Would you have let your newspaper marry this man?
Given the choice, Goldsmith would rather face the future as boss of Beaverbrook than as Grim Reaper of Private Eye. Ideally, he'd like to have been both. But a week ago, he at last capitulated to the insistence of Charles Wintour — ironically enough, one of the Eye's favourite and most resentful Aunt Sallies — that he must unload his octopoid litigation against the magazine if he wished ever to occupy the Aitken upholstery. So Simon Jenkins, the editor of the Evening Standard, became the last in a long line of Goldsmith emissaries, lunching, telephoning, meeting and negotiating with Richard Ingrams. Last weekend, the settlement hurdles were already behind, and the home straight in view. By Monday afternoon, the agreement of Goldsmith's QC, Lewis Hawser, had been secured and the champagne began to flow in Greek Street.
So on Monday morning, Hawser will stand up at the Old Bailey and announce that his client wishes to offer no evidence. A long-awaited trial, which would have thrown badly-needed light on an ancient law, will end in a whimper —embarrassing to one side and merciful to the other. The losers, apart from Goldsmith's pride, will be the press; it will not get its clarification of the criminal libel law, it will have to labour under a disastrous ruling on distributors, and it will lose one of the richest, longestrunning stories of recent years.
Through it all, Richard Ingrams and James Goldsmith have never met. They have eyed each other — Goldsmith with hostility, Ingrams with bafflement — across many courtrooms. Their paths —and swords
crossed, because of one of Goldsmith's friends, Lord Lucan. On 12 December, 1975, Private Eye published an article entitled `All's Well That Ends Elwes', which discussed the recent suicide of Dominic Elwes, the painter, a close friend of Lucan
• and Goldsmith. The piece, written by Patrick Marnham, who was to join Ingrams in the dock on Monday, mentioned a lunch held by some of Lucan's friends the day after his disappearance, when he was suspected of —but not yet charged with — the murder of his children's nanny. It went on to say that Goldsmith was present at the lunch — among 'the circle of gamblers and boneheads' with whom Lucan had associated — and to suggest that those present were conspiring to obstruct the course of justice.
Goldsmith was not at the lunch. He was, as it happens, addressing a meeting of accountants.in Ireland. An error, of some consequence, by Private Eye. But an error which had already been made by two other newspapers, The Sunday Times, and — now a delightful irony — the Daily Express. Both papers had said Goldsmith was at the lunch, without going on to make that highly libellous suggestion about its purpose. So Goldsmith was not as miffed with them as he was with Private Eye. He made his peace, privately, with each. Now he has made a separate peace with the Eye. •
And so we will have no answer to the central question which the action posed: when does a libel become a criminal libel? When is a man defamed so seriously that civil remedy is deemed insufficient? Journalistic swots, remembering their oversimplified handbooks, will tell you it is when that libel is 'likely to cause a breach of the peace'. That's what everyone had always thought. But this was radically contested at the committal proceedings; and now we won't know until the next time.
With the Lucan matter rumbling, over eighteen months, towards the Old Bailey, the antagonists were hard at it elsewhere. 'Slicker' of the Eye published several articles about Goldsmith's financial affairs, notably his connections with Slater Walker, and Goldsmith sued, sued and sued again. Ingrams lost count of the writs after they passed one hundred last summer. Goldsmith meanwhile tried very, hard, without success, to have Ingrams jailed for contempt of the criminal libel trial. But the most tortuous litigation, and the worst legacy of the whole debacle, was Goldsmith's assault on Private Eye's distributors.
Between 15 January and 2 February last year, Goldsmith issued eighty civil libel writs against forty of Private Eye's local distributors, retailers and wholesalers. Four actions were dropped — in his overenthusiasm, he had sued people who didn't handle the magazine — and nineteen were settled when the firms apologised and agreed to stop distributing. Private Eye's circulation of over 100,000 dropped to about 80,000 —a substantial loss of income.
Seventeen firms, however, resisted, and appeal followed counter-appeal all the way to the Master of the Rolls, the last stop before the House of Lords. Denning deli
vered a masterly judgment, ludicrouslY underplayed by most national newspapers, stressing the dangers and absurdities of holding a newspaper seller responsible fur the contents of the newspaper he sells. His colleagues Bridge and Scarman, then Pin' ceeded to adopt the strait-jacket position, and overruled him. James Comyn QC aPtlY referred totheir banalities as 'the tw9 minority reports', but Private Eye Was refused leave to appeal further. Goldsmith's settlement this week has released those distributors from their, undertakings, so Private Eye's norrnal circulation should soon be restored. Bill that appalling recent decision will, n` course, stand. It will be interesting to see the response of Goldsmith, as newspaPer baron, when someone tries to do it to Oa' Indeed the attitude of Goldsmith, prospective press Lord, has been revealing throughout. He has resisted all accusations that he was out to close Private Eye — even on the evidence that he was sealing off itsf distribution, trying to jail more than one its staff, and involving it in litigation it CO" afford less easily than he. His answer vas that he had offered settlement —true, but' the understanding that the paper wow cease writing about himself or his solicitor Eric Levine. Ingrams quite rightly refuse° such a settlement. What other newspaPer editor would accept it? What other publication, on the otheor hand, would .have received some f40,0,1?,1 from its readers to fight a case like this?
of which and more will be swallowed bY settlement). Goldsmith's answer would that it is all a sinister plot by extremists every kind. He has accused Private EYe and let us not forget he is a friend of Har°11 Wilson — of retaining a tightly-knit grouP.° politically motivated friends in the tnech50' In one American interview, he referred h`e them as 'the puss seeping 'through the system'; or perhaps. I should say us, as a has accused me of belonging to this gait: ('You're against me,' he once told tn.:e pacing up and down his suite at the Ritz a caged tiger, complaining that I le described him as pacing up and down ted witness box at Bow Street like a eag tiger): No one has sued him for such reinaOci But two other journalists — Michael Gillaair and Phillip Knightley — have sued him 'cies other remarks he has made at various stage, of the affair. A lot of slate-wiping and fae 0 saving has gone on this week, but those tt, actions apparently emerged unscathe:a They could both prove the most reveal" yet. Ingrams has said that the affair tnivi0 make Private Eye 'a little more careful of future', though he has every intenti°110d continuing to write about Goldsmith as), Levine. Goldsmith, meanwhile, may or not become boss of Beaverbrook New5177,1, t wel ers. If he does, he will have to prove tha jos, not Charles Wintour or Simon Je9/c. wants Jimmy Goldsmith to be thougni enlightened Crusader.
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