The bravery of Carole Cadwalladr

Carole Cadwalladr’s victory over Arron Banks is a triumph for free speech that has come at a cost no free society should bear. For the courts to rule on a passing remark she made in a 2019 TED talk and a tweet about the Leave.EU tycoon, who gave the pro-Brexit campaign the largest donation in British political history, has cost Banks somewhere between £750,000 and £1 million. Cadwalladr’s costs must be about the same, and it is very unlikely that the court will order that she and her supporters be reimbursed all their money. So we are talking about between £1.5 and £2 million for a single case.

For three years, as a friend and colleague of Cadwalladr’s, I’ve seen how lawyers have dominated her life. Discussion of Russian influence on British politics was chilled, not only by Banks’s action but by the Kremlin’s pet energy company Rosneft and several Russian billionaires suing Catherine Belton and the publishers of Putin’s People; a post-Soviet mining conglomerate’s action against Tom Burgis and the publishers of his study of kleptocracy; and the general fear the lawyers incubate that if you take on the super-rich you risk losing everything.