Telegraph will defend Galloway action

By Mary Stevens

Labour MP George Galloway has issued High Court libel proceedings against The Daily Telegraph, two months after the paper claimed that he accepted money from Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party regime.

Editor Charles Moore will be defending the action. Moore has already defended his paper’s story in an article, published two weeks ago, after a similar story in the Christian Science Monitor was proved to be based on false documents.

Galloway said the Monitor’s story proved there was a market in forged documents about him. Moore wrote: “There may be a market, but The Daily Telegraph is not part of it: we paid nothing for our story, no one supplied it to us, and our documents are not forged.”

Moore said the journalist who found the documents in Baghdad, David Blair, was not offered the documents and paid nothing for them. He added: “We have complete confidence in our story, in the authenticity of the documents and in David Blair.”