Peer wins damages in ‘Corbyn conference of hate’ row

A CONSERVATIVE peer has accepted “substantial” damages from the MailOnline’s publisher over “highly defamatory” allegations” about his attendance at a conference on Palestinian rights, also attended by Jeremy Corbyn.

Lord Sheikh, 79, sued Associated Newspapers for libel over an August 2018 article that accused him of attending “Corbyn’s hate conference” after “years of rubbing shoulders with Islamists, hate preachers and Holocaust deniers”.

The Tory peer later confirmed he attended the conference in Tunisia in 2014 – at which Mr Corbyn was pictured at a wreath-laying ceremony at the Palestinian Martyrs’ Cemetery in Tunis – but insisted the focus was the “Arab Spring, affecting the whole of the Middle East and North Africa”.

The High Court heard yesterday that Lord Sheikh had been invited to speak at the event.

The peer’s solicitor, Callum Galbraith, said in his speech Lord Sheikh “advocated, consistent with UK Government policy, that to achieve a lasting peace, a twostate solution should provide for security for the state of Israel and respect for the rights of the Palestinian people”.

Mr Galbraith told Mr Justice Warby his client “played no part in the wreath-laying ceremony, which was not part of the conference agenda, and he was not even aware of it until media reports surfaced in 2018”.

Associated News “now accepts the very serious allegations it published... are untrue and has undertaken not to repeat them”, Mr Galbraith said. He said the publisher had also “agreed to pay a substantial sum of damages to the claimant and his legal costs”.

Gervase de Wilde, for the company, told the court his client offered “its sincere apologies for the distress, embarrassment and upset caused”.