Things go from bad to worse for Laurence Fox. In October, he was sacked from his GB News gig; in December, the Reclaim leader shed his party’s sole MP. And today, the actor-turned-politician lost a High Court libel case with two people he called ‘paedophiles’ on social media. Former Stonewall trustee Simon Blake and drag artist Crystal duly launched the action follow a row on Twitter/X October 2020 about Sainsbury’s decision to mark Black History Month.

Fox counter-sued the pair and TalkTV broadcaster Nicola Thorp over tweets accusing him of racism. But in a ruling today, High Court judge Mrs Justice Collins Rice ruled in favour of Blake and Seymour and dismissed Fox’s counter-claims. She said:

Mr Fox’s labelling of Mr Blake and Mr Seymour as paedophiles was, on the evidence, probabilities and facts of this case, seriously harmful, defamatory and baseless. The law affords few defences to defamation of this sort. Mr Fox did not attempt to show these allegations were true, and he was not able to bring himself on the facts within the terms of any other defence recognised in law.

The judge did not make a ruling on whether describing Fox as ‘a racist’ was ‘substantially true’, after finding the three tweets in his counter-claim were unlikely to cause serious harm to his reputation. Speaking outside the Royal Courts of Justice, Fox described the ruling in his libel case as a ‘nothing burger’. He said:

It means that we’re going to have to go back to court, to appeal, to get a meaning of this word. What is a racist? Every single person in this country knows what a racist is, except the people that dominate every single national institution that we have.

Good to see the controversies of the past have blunted him eh…