Randolph Rampant
By ALOYSIUS C. PEPPER
No one who has talked to an American or continental journalist during the, past week about the affair of Mr. Randolph Churchill and Private Eye can fail to reflect in some wonder on the current state of the British libel laws. To anyone familiar with the more scurrilous forms of American journalism, or indeed with the sort of gutter lampooning that was familiar in this country from the days of Caxton until a mere thirty or forty years ago, the sight of the howdahed and powdered High Court elephant, decked out with the finest legal talent in the land, being used to crack the walnut of an undergraduate strip-cartoon is, to say the least of it, strange.
The facts of the case were simple and ludicrous enough in themselves. On February 8, Private Eye published a back-page strip com- ment on the fact that Randolph Churchill has been invited to write the official biography of his father. , An apparently harmless joke was made of the fact that Mr. Churchill, like most efficient and exhaustive biographers, employs a team of re- search assistants to help him compile the facts —and the suggestion was made, in humorous vein, that certain events in Sir Winston's stormy life would not be presented in the biography in the unfavourable light in which they had been seen originally by some contemporaries.
It was perhaps not surprising that, as a sub- scriber to Private Eye, Mr. Churchill should take issue with the magazine in his own, time- honoured, rumbustious fashion—by firing off an angry letter (later published in the Evening Standard) demanding some explanation of the 'points made in the cartoon.'
However, this particular exchange was not destined simply to stop at a series of letters between parties to what was largely a historical dispute. The editor of Private Eye, to whom Mr. Churchill's letter had been addressed, was unable to reply at once, since he was on holiday in Scotland. He returned to London to find that writs had been issued against all twelve mem- bers of the Private Eye staff—two of them addressed to mere nicknames which had found their way on to the magazine's masthead—and that Mr. Churchill had retained for his High Court action two of Britain's leading QCs, the most outstanding junior on libel law, and (eventually) two other juniors, one of them the son of ,a Cabinet Minister.
Mr. Churchill was obviously taking Private Eye's comment as a serious threat to the repu- tations both of himself and of his father. Private Eye's own reaction was ingenuous—and typical. Within a few hours of the arrival of the writs, they had put up in their Soho shop window a series of cartoons that were simply abusive of Mr. Churchill in an eighteenth-century vein—charming or revolting according to your taste. Again within hours, legal history had been made for the first, but not for the last, time in the case. An ex parte mandatory injunction was issued in the High Court restraining Private Eye from continuing
to publish the offending material—which they reluctantly replaced by a poster reading, 'KILL- JOY WAS HERE.' The next morning Mr. Churchill's solicitors advised the magazine by telephone that this, too, should be removed, which it was, promptly. Shortly before the hear- ing of the proceedings on the second injunction before the due majesty of a Judge in Chambers, Private Eye completed their own legal represen- tation—and, for the first time, considered seriously how they should fight the case.
They had three possible lines of approach. The first was to admit straight away that they would probably lose, that they had no money and that, therefore, they should apologise and hope to cut their losses. The second was that they should attempt to justify in fact what they had originally put down as humorous exaggera- tion—which, as anyone would know who attempted to justify absolutely a cartoon, for instance of Mr. Macmillan making amorous advances to de Gaulle in the cartoons of last year, could be a difficult exercise. The third line Private Eye could, it appears, have taken—had the case gone to court—would have been to plead that scurrilous comment of the nature of Private Eye's usual fare is hardly worthy of the atten- tion of the flower of the British legal profession, let alone the family of the Greatest Living Englishman. And that Sir Winston himself has been frequently exposed to vicious and vilely libellous attacks which he either ignored, because of the ignobility of their source, or re- turned with knobs on. As it has turned out, through a chain of obscure and inexplicable circumstances, the case has been settled—again in an unprecedented way—with the publication of Mr. Churchill's original letter all over a page of the Evening Standard, and an unreserved withdrawal by Private Eye of any remarks (unspecified) which might have constituted 'false allegations.'
The reason for Private Eye's withdrawal would appear to be a simple one. It seems to be generally agreed that any jury confronted with remarks that in any way impugned the divinity of Sir Winston Churchill would need hear no more argument. And that the total cost of the case to Private Eye, if it were fought and lost, thanks to Mr. Churchill's care in engaging sufficient legal representation to ensure that his case did not, at least, go by default, could have been in the region of £40,000.
As it is, it cost them a bare £3,000—and their pride, in having to furnish Lord Beaverbrook with advertising revenue. But one need be no friend of Private Eye—one may even think that this is what they've been asking for for months —to admit that the gap between the actual damage a man can suffer and the unpredictable damages he can exact in court has become un- realistic.
Mr. Randolph Churchill apart (needless to say), methinks the Plaintiff doth protest too much. . . . The only trouble is that he is aided and abetted by the 'same institution under which a man can go to the gallows.
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