Diary – 3 May 2003

This is not a statement that will wring many heart-strings, but if there’s one group of professionals which has been a bit down-at-heel in recent months it’s libel lawyers. For a variety of reasons – Jeffrey Archer languishing in jail among them – there has not been a queue of claimants outside the Inns of Court waiting to consult eminent practitioners in the black arts of defamation. So the impending case of Galloway v. Moore has put a spring in the step of m’learned friends. For a while it had looked as though we would never again see a titanic High Court slugging match between two veteran pugilists. And now we’ve got one. Doubtless there is some spread-betting site somewhere on the Internet offering odds on the forthcoming encounter. Nothing in libel is simple, far less certain. The late George Carman was by no means the only defamation silk to have conjured eleventh-hour rabbits out of hitherto invisible hats.