Michael Charman v Orion Publishing Group Ltd
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Lord Justice Ward,Lord Justice Sedley,Lord Justice Hooper |
| Judgment Date | 11 October 2007 |
| Neutral Citation | [2007] EWCA Civ 972 |
| Docket Number | Case No: A2/2006/2198 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Civil Division) |
| Date | 11 October 2007 |
[2007] EWCA Civ 972
the Rt Hon. Lord Justice Ward
the Rt Hon. Lord Justice Sedley and
the Rt Hon. Lord Justice Hooper
Case No: A2/2006/2198
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
THE HON. MR JUSTICE GRAY
Hq04X01682
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
Adrienne Page QC, Adam Speker and Matthew Nicklin (instructed by Wiggin LLP) for the appellants
Hugh Tomlinson QC and Lucy Moorman (instructed by Simons Muirhead & Burton) for the respondent
Hearing date: 19th, 20th, 28th and 29th March 2007
Judgement
Lord Justice Ward
Introduction
The subject matter of this appeal is a libel action being tried in stages by Gray J. without a jury. The claimant is Mr Michael Charman, a former detective constable in the Metropolitan Police force. He claims that he has been defamed in a book called “ Bent Coppers” written by Mr Graeme McLagan and published in hardback by the Orion Publishing Group Ltd and in paperback by Orion Books Ltd.
On 17th June 2005 Gray J ordered that the action be tried by judge alone. On 14th October 2005 he ruled at the first stage of the trial on the defamatory meaning conveyed by the book. He held that the book did not mean to the ordinary reasonable reader that Mr Charman had been guilty of corruption as Mr Charman contended it meant nor that there were only reasonable grounds to investigate whether he had abused his position as police officer by receiving corrupt payments or even that there were reasonable grounds to suspect him of so doing as contended for by the defendants. Instead the judge held that the defamatory meaning was slightly above Chase level 2 ( Chase v Newsgroup Newspapers Ltd [2002] EWCA Civ. 1772; [2003] EMLR 218), because he considered that the phrase “reasonable grounds” was “inadequate to convey the degree of suspicion to the readers.” He held that the ordinary reasonable reader of the books taking them as a whole, whether in the hardback edition or in the paperback edition, would understand them to mean:
“that there are cogent grounds to suspect that Mr Charman abused his position as a police officer by colluding with Brennan in the commission of substantial fraud by Geoffrey Brennan from whom he and Mr Redgrave received corrupt payments totalling £50,000” (emphasis added).
The next stage of the trial was to resolve the preliminary issue of qualified privilege, both common law and statutory. On 13th July 2006 Gray J. ordered that the qualified privilege defences be dismissed and his judgment is now reported at [2006] EWHC 1756 (QB), [2007] 1 All E.R. 622. Giving the defendants permission to appeal, Keene L.J. observed that:
“The case, and the grounds of appeal, raise important issues about the steps required of an author and publisher in order to qualify for a defence of the “Reynolds” type of qualified privilege, when the publication in question is a book and not a newspaper article, where the topic is one of public interest but is also complex, and where the author has made attempts to obtain the claimant's side of the story.”
To be a little more specific in this introduction, the issues of law, leaving statutory privilege aside, are essentially these:
(1) what is the extent of the privilege claimed for “reportage” and how does this fit into the Reynolds type of qualified privilege developed by and since Reynolds v Times Newspapers Ltd [2001] A.C. 127 ?
(2) What is the proper approach for the Court to take in judging whether the author and the publishers have acted responsibly in communicating the information to the public?
Once the relevant principles of law are identified, then a great deal of factual material will need to be investigated in order to establish, putting it very broadly for the moment, whether the books were published in a fair, balanced and neutral way, without adoption by the appellants and whether the defamatory information was responsibly reported.
Setting the scene: a précis
Mr Graeme McLagan (I shall henceforth, like the judge, refer to him and others simply by their surnames) is a journalist of many years' standing. He started his career as a reporter on the Newcastle Journal and then worked for the Daily Mail in the 1960s. In 1971 he joined the BBC and later became the Deputy Home Affairs Correspondent for both radio and television. From the late 1970s onwards, he took a special interest in the issue of police corruption. In the early 1980s he reported on the first major enquiry by an outside police force into police corruption within the Metropolitan Police force (“the Met”). He covered the several trials which arose out of it. He reported on abuses in the system of using informants in a Panorama television programme in 1982. He reported on the criminal trials of several allegedly corrupt police officers and in 1988 presented another Panorama programme about police corruption.
The hardback version of Bent Coppers was published by the first defendant on 9th June 2003. It is subtitled “The Inside Story of Scotland Yard's Battle Against Police Corruption”. On the cover are words attributed to the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens: “This is a story that deserves to be told – warts and all”. On the inside of the cover:
“This is the inside story of the 'Ghost Squad' and how it broke into the secret world of police corruption. … Graeme McLagan's gripping account reveals the ugly underside of London's police force and why teams from America and Australia have now come to Britain to find out how the Met is winning the battle against bent coppers.”
The book has sixteen chapters giving a chronological account of the periodic and eventually partly successful purges against police corruption carried out within the Met and the South Eastern Regional Crime Squad (“SERCS”) from the 1960s onwards. It is 260 pages long.
The paperback edition published by the third defendant on 1st April 2004 has 19 chapters, spread over 439 pages but as the judge held at the trial of the preliminary issue on meaning, the paperback version bore the same meaning as the hardback even though there were a substantial number of changes.
Charman sought damages for libel in respect of both the hardback and the paperback edition of the book by a claim issued on 4th June 2004, over a year after the publication of the hardback edition.
He served in the Met from 1971 until 6th May 2004 when he was required to resign following the finding of an internal disciplinary panel that he had acted in a manner likely to bring discredit to the reputation of the force. He was part of the team investigating the Brink's Mat robbery in about 1983, as was Mr John Redgrave (“Redgrave”) who attained the rank of detective inspector and Chris Smith (“Smith”) who became a detective sergeant. Whereas Charman and Redgrave established a good friendship, bad blood appears to have fractured the relationship between Charman and Smith.
In June 1993 Charman was in the Flying Squad based at Tower Bridge. He became the handler of an informant called Geoffrey Brennan (“Brennan”). Brennan was also passing information to Smith. He was himself a small-time criminal who had got to know “high-calibre criminals.” He ran a retail mobile telephone business in Bexleyheath.
In the summer of 2003 the police set up an operation called “Nightshade” which was investigating allegations of drug trafficking in Venezuela, the production of amphetamines in Portugal and, ostensibly, money-laundering and/or gun running from the United States to Northern Ireland. This third strand lies at the heart of the present controversy, much of which is, of course, hotly disputed.
It is the defendants' case that this third element of Operation Nightshade was a fabrication by Brennan, Charman and Redgrave devised in order to conceal their own involvement in criminal activity. Brennan and a man known as “Tall Ted” Williams conspired to steal £400,000 from two Chinese American businessmen (“the Wangs”) by pretending to sell them mobile phones for resale in China. The defendants contend that there were cogent grounds to suspect that, having become aware of this conspiracy, Charman and Redgrave struck a dishonest deal with Brennan that he would pay them £50,000 in return for their protection, were he to be arrested, by pretending that he was giving the police information about a money-laundering operation being run from the United States by the Wangs.
The Wangs duly paid Brennan for the mobiles and Brennan claimed that he then paid £10,000 to each of Charman and Redgrave and later handed over the remaining £30,000 in a plastic bag. The Wangs waited in vain in Hong Kong for their mobile phones and in October reported the theft to the Kent police.
Brennan was arrested on 12 November 1993. He claimed that everything he had done vis à vis the Wangs had been in the full knowledge of Charman and Redgrave and that he had paid them £50,000. It is alleged that the next day Redgrave and Charman met the Bexleyheath officers and told them that if the theft enquiry were pursued, it would put both the informant Brennan and the under cover officers in Operation Nightshade at risk. They asked that the theft enquiries be put on hold. The investigation was then transferred from Bexleyheath to SERCS where Redgrave was serving. DC Maul was put in charge of the theft enquiry but Redgrave continued to intervene during these early months of 1994.
In about May 1994 Detective Chief...
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