My Greatest Mistake: Richard Ingrams, Editor of 'The Oldie' and former editor of 'Private Eye'
'There was no precedent, so nobody quite knew how long a sentence I might be facing'
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Your support makes all the difference.As an editor, you can never predict where you are going to get trouble from. In my case, it was over the use of a single word in a piece for Private Eye.
The article was about Lord Lucan, who was suspected of murdering his wife in 1974. Lucan was very well connected and had a lot of rich friends, including Sir James Goldsmith and John Aspinall, and the day after the murder, they got together for lunch to work out how they could help. We wrote about that, using a sentence that went something like: "From the beginning, the police have met nothing but obstruction from the circle of boneheads and gamblers who are friends of Lucan."
The wrong word was "obstruction", because obstructing the police with their inquiries is a criminal offence. If we had used some other word, I don't think the article would have caused any trouble. As it was, Goldsmith applied to bring an action of criminal libel against us.
Criminal libel is different from ordinary libel because it is deemed to be a criminal offence and can result in the editor concerned going to prison. Nothing like this had happened to a publication for nearly a century, and it soon became a bit of a cause célèbre.
Nobody thought that Goldsmith stood an earthly chance of getting leave to take us to court – but, to the amazement of everyone, he succeeded, and I was prosecuted for criminal libel. Because there was no modern precedent for it, nobody quite knew how long a sentence I might be facing.
The case went on for several months, but in the end Goldsmith withdrew the charges because, at the time, he was trying to buy up newspapers and was advised that if he wanted to be a newspaper proprietor, it didn't look good to send editors to prison. All we had to do was pay a small amount of his costs and publish an apology. But I still had to go to No 1 court at the Old Bailey and be pronounced not guilty, which was rather exciting.
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