Green energy industrialist Dale Vince has won a three-year legal battle against the Daily Mail after he was misleadingly pictured next to a headline about a “sex pest” Labour donor.
Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers will be ordered to pay damages after a Court of Appeal ruling found in Vince’s favour – the first successful data protection claim of its kind.
Vince declared the judgment means “headlines won’t be the same again”.
In June 2023 the Daily Mail published an article on Mail+ with the headline: “Labour repays £100,000 to sex pest donor.” The term was “‘sex harassment’ donor” in the print version.
Vince was pictured twice alongside the print article, and one of the images featured a circle around his face. But he was not the man referred to in the headline.
The article was about a City financier, Davide Serra, accused of sexual harassment who had donated £100,000 to Labour, which the party returned. Vince was first mentioned in the fourth paragraph when the article said: “And Labour faced further embarrassment yesterday when businessman Dale Vince, who has donated £1.5m to the party, joined an eco-protest in London with Just Stop Oil, the group he is helping to bankroll.”
In the version of the story on the Mail+ app, the images of Vince were changed to one of Serra 47 minutes after publication. But the original version was available on PressReader until October 2023.
Vince initially brought defamation proceedings against Associated Newspapers but this claim was struck out in July 2024 when a High Court judge followed the Charleston v News Group Newspapers precedent that a libel claim must be founded on the whole article taken together, not solely a headline.
Vince then pursued a data protection claim for unfair processing but this was thrown out last year by High Court judge Mr Justice Swift who said he had “no real prospect” of success and that the case was an abuse of process.
The Court of Appeal has now ruled that Mr Justice Swift’s decision should be reversed and summary judgment for damages should be granted to Vince.
Daily Mail pictures of Dale Vince were ‘misleading’
Appeal judges Sir Geoffrey Vos, Lord Justice Warby and Lady Justice Whipple said the case was “not abusive” because the data protection claim was issued before the defamation claim was struck out. They found that the previous judge was “rather too harsh” on Vince for bringing the second claim.
Explaining why the previous judge was wrong, the judgment noted that the privacy clause of the Editors’ Code of Practice enforced by press regulator IPSO, of which the Daily Mail is a member, “makes clear that newspapers must ‘take care not to publish … misleading … information or images, including headlines not supported by the text’, which goes beyond the accuracy obligation”.
“Associated Newspapers, in this case, failed to take care not to publish misleading information and images in the articles. The information in the headline juxtaposed next to the images of Mr Vince would have misled many casual readers into thinking that Mr Vince was the ‘sex harassment donor’
referred to.”
It was “irrelevant” that IPSO had rejected a complaint from Vince, the ruling said, because the regulator only considered an allegation of inaccuracy, not the suggestion that the headline and photos together were misleading.
The judgment continued: “The view expressed in some authorities that the Charleston principle is applicable to a claim for inaccurate data processing cannot be read across to a claim for unfair processing. Whether or not the headline and images were ‘inaccurate’ by reason of the Charleston rule, they were certainly ‘misleading’.
“It is conceded that Mr Vince sustained some material harm, so summary judgment for damages to be assessed is appropriate, even if there may be argument about the existence and extent of nonmaterial harm.”
Daily Mail night editor explains publication
Daily Mail night editor Andrew Gregory had previously told the court the stories about Serra and Vince were combined because of “the constraints of space in the paper” and the fact he “did not want two articles about two Labour donors on two different pages in the paper”.
He said he instructed his deputy to combine the stories leading with the “better news story” about Serra but decided to use the new photos of Vince and asked that “the story be edited to remove any ambiguity surrounding why [Vince] was pertinent”.
He told the court: “In my suggestion as to how to treat these two Labour donor stories, I was in no way attempting to mislead the reader into thinking the donor pictured was the ‘sex harassment’ individual. Indeed the text of the story very carefully sets out that he wasn’t.
“My job is to serve the interests of the readers of the Daily Mail, and that is what I consider myself to have done with the treatment of this information.”
In the appeal judgment, Sir Geoffrey Vos said this explanation was “unconvincing”.
“I can understand that mistakes occur in a hard-pressed newsroom,” the judge said. “But his explanation is not that a mistake was made that was quickly rectified (though it was rectified online). His explanation is that the juxtaposition was, in some way, justified by the fact that Mr Vince had that day attended a Just Stop Oil demonstration.
“In my judgment, it was not so justified. Mr Vince was, until it is shown that he acted unlawfully (which has not occurred), entitled to exercise his rights of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly under articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention), just as those who hold an opposite opinion are so entitled.”
Dale Vince responds to Daily Mail data protection win
Vince said: “It sounds grand, because it is – headlines won’t be the same again after this ruling. Not just headlines but articles too.
“Three years ago the Mail ran a highly misleading headline, using pictures of me in a headline not about me. It was a damaging reputational attack. The Daily Mail thought they could get away with it because they were protected by a libel law that was so old, it almost predated the internet. They were wrong.
“The fallacy at the heart of libel law is the assumption that people read both headlines and articles in full. We all know this is not true; we all scan headlines and think we know what the story is. But that element of libel law has stood for over three decades, while the internet grew, social media came into the world, and our attention spans famously shrank. Libel law in our country is not fit for purpose. It needs updating for the modern era. That’s not a fight I intend to pursue. I think I’ve done enough for now.
“This landmark ruling, based on legislation and assumptions of behaviour from this century will change media behaviour in Britain – starting now. And it is likely to have the same effect in Europe, as GDPR legislation is European wide. Huge credit goes to my lawyers, Brett Wilson – for this.
“Not everybody has the will and the resources to fight powerful media groups like the Daily Mail. Many people facing similar injustices simply have to live with it, grin and bear it. Not anymore, the biggest outcome of this three year battle, for me, is that nobody now will face that same treatment and have no affordable recourse.
“From today newspaper headlines will never be the same again – because media outlets have a new duty of fairness and we the people have a new means to enforce it. Something so many of our media outlets fail to do voluntarily to their great shame is now not a choice. The Daily Mail faces substantial costs and damages, but worse than that for them is this new duty of fairness – that throws their current business model out of the window.”
‘Common sense’ judgment closes legal loophole over misleading headlines
Iain Wilson, managing partner at Brett Wilson LLP, said: “The Court of Appeal has effectively closed a loophole in the law that has allowed newspapers and news websites to publish misleading headlines provided that the true position is reflected in the body of the accompanying articles. This is a common-sense judgment, which recognises that in the modern age of short attention spans, news content is often skim-read. Online headlines may not even be clicked on and yet the information contained within them will nevertheless be absorbed.
“Whilst the law of libel itself remains unchanged, editors of both newspapers and news websites will need to take extra care to ensure that headlines and the placement of photographs are not misleading, and thus unfair. If they fail to do this, they risk being found liable for breaching data protection legislation and could be ordered to pay substantial damages and costs.”
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