The green energy businessman and Forest Green Rovers chairman claimed the newspaper libelled him in a June 2023 article titled “Labour repays £100,000 to ‘sex harassment’ donor”.
Vince’s lawyers accepted that anyone who read the entire article “would appreciate very quickly that he was not the person being accused of sexual harassment”. However, they claimed the Daily Mail had defamed Vince by innuendo, by putting a picture of him under a headline about a Labour donor being accused of sexual harassment.
They successfully cited a precedent set in a 1995 legal case involving the News of the World and the actors who played Harold and Madge Bishop in the television soap Neighbours. The tabloid had published an article under the headline “Strewth! What’s Harold up to with our Madge?” accompanied by a photograph seemingly showing the two actors having sex.
Judge Jaron Lewis concluded that this principle applied to Vince’s case against the Daily Mail, meaning the headline and picture could not be considered in isolation from the rest of the article. As a result, he concluded that Vince’s case was “bound to fail” and could not proceed to trial.