Former Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s libel battle with ex-MP Andrew Bridgen looks set to go to trial.
Mr Hancock, who was on the frontline of government during the pandemic, is being sued by the former North West Leicestershire MP over a post on social media platform X, then known as Twitter, in January 2023. The former Tory Cabinet minister has been accused of writing a “malicious” post in response to Mr Bridgen comparing Covid jabs to the Holocaust.
A High Court judge on Monday refused Mr Hancock’s bid to end the case and said it can go to trial.
In 2023, Mr Bridgen shared a link to an article “concerning data about deaths and other adverse reactions linked to Covid vaccines”, stating: “As one consultant cardiologist said to me, this is the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.” Hours later, Mr Hancock posted: “Disgusting and dangerous antisemitic, anti-vax, anti-scientific conspiracy theories spouted by a sitting MP this morning are unacceptable and have absolutely no place in our society.”
Mr Bridgen has previously said the comment was “seriously defamatory and untrue” and has argued to the court it intended to cause “grievous harm” to his reputation.
Mr Hancock, who was Conservative health secretary from 2018 to 2021, unsuccessfully asked a judge to throw out the case last year, and at a hearing in March asked the court in London to rule in his favour before a trial. Mr Bridgen opposed the application, with his barristers calling it a “desperate last throw of the dice”.
In a judgment on Monday, Mrs Justice Collins Rice dismissed Mr Hancock’s bid, adding that whether Mr Bridgen succeeds in his case “is likely to depend on a full examination of the evidence both ways” and that there should not be a “mini-trial in advance of the evidential situation even being known”.
She continued: “My task on this application is not to consider who has the better case at this stage, much less who is more likely to win. My task is to consider whether Mr Bridgen’s case is unreal.” She added: “Mr Bridgen’s case as pleaded and evidenced so far does not have an obvious quality of unreality.”
The judge concluded: “I am not in a position to conclude at this stage that Mr Bridgen’s prospects of success on either matter are such as to be determinable now to be ‘unreal’, and in any event there are, in my view, compelling reasons for further investigation at trial and a fully considered judgment thereafter.”
Mrs Justice Collins Rice said the case was “therefore set to proceed to the full evidential stages and on to trial”.
The judge also said that Mr Bridgen’s “pleading of the counter-defence is, however, defective”, adding that he had a “limited opportunity” to amend it.
Mr Bridgen was suspended by the Conservatives after his post and expelled from the party in April 2023. He then sat as an MP for Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party and then became an independent MP until he was defeated in the 2024 general election. He previously said he wished to “clear his name” through the libel action over Mr Hancock’s “malicious” post.
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Mr Hancock resigned as health secretary after footage emerged of him kissing an aide in breach of Covid-19 social distancing rules, and he stepped down as MP for West Suffolk last year. He has previously called the case “absurd” and labelled Mr Bridgen’s claims “ridiculous”.
In a ruling last year, Mrs Justice Collins Rice found Mr Hancock’s post was not “definitively condemning the MP as an individual” and that the majority of the publication was an “expression of opinion”. She added that she was “satisfied the ordinary reasonable reader would not have understood this tweet in the terms Mr Bridgen most fears”.
She said: “They were being told Mr Hancock’s strong opinions about the character, or mode of expression, of what had been said, rather than any facts, or even opinions, about the convictions, beliefs or intentions of the unnamed MP in this respect.”
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