What exactly happened with Lord McAlpine this month? And what did Twitter have to do with it?

[emh]

At uni one professor has been talking about the Lord McAlpine case for a few weeks now and I've understood that the lord was mistakenly accused of child abuse sometime in the 1970s or '80s. But who actually accused him? Did the BBC name him? Or were there simply rumours on Twitter about it?

Please tell me if you've followed the case, I'm kind of confused during our lectures.

[marcus]

"I've understood that the lord was mistakenly accused of child abuse sometime in the 1970s or '80s. But who actually accused him?"

He was accused in 1992 by the magazine Scallywag. See the article here:

http://philosophers-stone.co.uk/wordpres…
(this includes images of the original Scallywag article).

He chose not to sue them over this accusation. He implied in a recent interview on Radio 4 - transcript here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/nov…
that the reason he didn't sue was because Scallywag went bankrupt. Scallywag was sued a year or so later by John Major, and was shut down as a result. Since he's been so quick off the mark to threaten people after the twitter incidents, it does seem surprising that he allowed the Scallywag accusations to go un-sued for a year or so.

He was also accused by David Icke in his book The Biggest Secret later in the 90's. There's more on that here:
http://philosophers-stone.co.uk/wordpres…

He didn't sue for this either; however, it should be acknowledged that David Icke is regarded by some as, how should I put it, rather flakey, and so might be deemed to be "not worth suing".


"Did the BBC name him? Or were there simply rumours on Twitter about it?"

No, the BBC didn't name him, but some twitterers did, because they had been given a heads-up by one of the team working on the BBC2 TV Newsnight article that kicked off the whole twitter row. It seems odd, indeed extraordinary, that it may be possible to sue for slander an organisation which hasn't actually named you. Of course, he didn't actually sue the BBC, nor did he sue ITV subsequently; he threatened to sue, and they both responded to his lawyers' demands and paid up. In fact, I am not aware of him ever having sued ANYONE about the accusations of child abuse that have been made against him. If that is the case, one might suspect that the Twitterers are safe and that he'll not actually sue any of them. But such is the power of the mere threat of lawyers being involved that apparently many hundred of the twitterers have already apologised and paid £5 or some such figure to charity.

I hope this provides you with a background to the situation - curious case, and of course there is no reason to suppose the accusations are anything but outrageous false slurs.

[Dragonfighter]

A little bit of clarification to Marcus's excellent response: Lord McAlpine probably didn't sue Scallywag as it was a low circulation magazine and either he didn't know about its accusations or (more likely) he decided, that in the pre-internet age, that the case would generate wast swathes of negative publicity and bring the matter to the public's attention (no smoke without fire etc) that it would be counter-productive to sue.
Also it is not necessary to name someone for them to be libelled, all that is required is that enough information is given to identify the individual involved.
Slander is spoken defamation, libel is written defamation and so the twitter users would be sued for libel.
There is a suggestion that an individual who shared a surname with Lord McAlpine and who was deceased, was mentioned in the report and the fact of his decease was stated in the report
Davis Icke is best known for his theory that the world is run by alien lizards who eat people and have assumed positions of power (Royal Family, POTUS, Union Leaders, CEO's of major international companies) and so is not regarded as a credible source for any information.