Why Lord Advocate should come clean: Drum Leader Oct 15
The Drum is continuing its fight with the Scottish Information Commissioner and Lord Advocate to find out who paid legal fees to silence the press. Here is The Drum's latest leader which outlines why we are pursuing this cause.
We’ll tell you why this apparently dry, technical issue has ramifications for us all. ‘The doors of the High Court’ goes the old saying, ‘Like those of the Ritz, are open to rich and poor alike.’
It is often used in relation to libel actions. For it is well known the depths of a claimants pockets is always more important than the strength of their case.
That is why it was used by the likes of Robert Maxwell, for example, to silence the media, threatening expensive actions that media owners could not afford to win, but he could afford to lose.
And the fact that libel is so loved as an instrument of stifling criticism by the likes of Robert Maxwell is why one must greet the news that a political appointee, public servant and head of Scotland’s prosecution service resorted to using this legal instrument herself.
But if the fact that the Lord Advocate Elish Angiolini threatened to sue for defamation to defend her personal reputation is noteworthy itself, what about the issue of who paid her legal bill?
Despite the fact that if the action was successful the only outcome would have been for The Firm to pay her compensation personally, she won’t tell us. And now the Scottish Information Commissioner has denied our request to compel the Crown Office to hand over the information.
It is an important point. If she was paying for the action personally then perhaps The Firm could have afforded to take her on. But if we were actually up against the State, then obviously we would not have had a snowball’s chance in hell.
No matter the merits of our case this company would have simply been ruined and our titles, in all probability, shut down.
A political appointee, using state resources, to threaten the future of a publishing house is something one might expect to happen in Putin’s Russia. But not an advanced Western democracy. And that is why we will be pursuing this issue as we outline in more detail on page 22.