A journalist who carried out a stalking campaign on former chancellor George Osborne and his wife Thea Rogers, including reporting the couple to social services and sending gifts for their young children, has been spared jail.
Lydia Suffield, 29, sent emails containing false allegations about the couple to their friends and family and reported them to social services in harassment which Mr Osborne described as “utterly debilitating”.
The freelance writer also filed eight anonymous false referrals about the couple to children’s charity the NSPCC, which resulted in them being investigated for drug abuse and neglect of their young children, Isleworth Crown Court heard.
In his victim impact statement, Mr Osborne said: “No one who hasn’t been a victim of this kind of stalking and harassment can understand how utterly debilitating it is.”
Suffield used a number of anonymous email addresses to make the “hurtful allegations”, the full details of which prosecutor Paul Jarvis KC did not refer to in court because of what he called “a real danger that the victims would suffer the harm that they hoped Ms Suffield’s guilty pleas would spare them from”.
Mr Osborne, who was the Conservative MP for Tatton in Cheshire for 16 years until 2017, described the stalking, which prosecutors said involved dozens of emails to the couple’s friends and family, as a “campaign to ruin our lives”, while Ms Rogers said the “malicious” stalking “completely ruined well over a year of my life”.
The 29-year-old began her contact with Mr Osborne’s acquaintances when she contacted his friend, Conservative peer Lord Daniel Finkelstein, in messages on social media in 2020, Mr Jarvis said.
Lord Finkelstein agreed to meet Suffield in person in April 2022, which he hoped would “stem the flurry” of messages she was sending him, but after their meeting she continued to bombard him with messages, most of which referenced Mr Osborne, the court heard.
From summer 2022, the stalking incidents increased, with Suffield sending messages to Ms Rogers and people linked to the couple, including Ms Rogers’ mother, making false allegations about the former politician.
Mitigating, Marie Spenwyn said the information Suffield sent to the couple and their friends was “available publicly”, including on the cult newsletter Popbitch.
The stalking culminated in Suffield sending gifts for Mr Osborne and Ms Rogers’ children through Lord Finkelstein, sending allegations to guests ahead of the couple’s wedding in June 2023 and making false reports to parliamentary authorities.
Ms Rogers called the gifts “creepy” and said she had considered cancelling the wedding.
“My anxiety increased as it was clear she wasn’t just interested in me,” Ms Rogers said in her victim impact statement, read to the court by Mr Jarvis.
Mr Osborne, who was Tory chancellor under David Cameron for six years until July 2016, said of Suffield’s actions in the lead-up to the wedding: “She went to great lengths under the cowardly cloak of anonymity to utterly ruin our day.”
When Suffield, who the court heard has autism, dyspraxia and ADHD, was arrested in October 2023, police seized her electronic devices and notebooks.
Mr Jarvis said searches of these items “revealed the depth of her obsession with George Osborne”.
“The notebooks contained a wealth of personal information about the Osborne family,” Mr Jarvis told the court.
“There was also fan fiction that Ms Suffield had written about Mr Osborne, and one piece entitled Thea Rogers Hates Lydia Suffield.
“Ms Suffield had even saved a copy of the Facebook profiles of Mr Osborne’s adult children.”
Red-haired Suffield sent the messages between June 8 2022 and July 5 2023, and made the referrals to the NSPCC charity between March and June 2023.
Suffield, from Liverpool, had denied two counts of stalking involving serious alarm or distress, in breach of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, and in May she re-entered not guilty pleas to those charges but admitted two lesser offences of stalking.
The more serious charges lie on file.
Mrs Justice Cutts spared Suffield jail, suspending her 22-week custodial sentence for two years, but told her: “The offences you committed are so serious that I have come close to giving an immediate custodial sentence.”
Suffield, who wore a white and red striped shirt in the dock, confirmed she understood that if she committed another crime within two years she would likely go to prison.
The judge said Suffield’s interest in Mr Osborne began “as a result of her interest in journalism” but said her continuing behaviour was not.
“By your repeated contact with the NSPCC, you were not trying to obtain a scoop,” Mrs Justice Cutts said.
“You were intending to disrupt, if not ruin, their lives as much as you could without revealing your identity.”
She said the stalking was “persistent, determined, well planned and sophisticated”.
“It caused them a great deal of distress over a protracted period,” Mrs Justice Cutts said.
Suffield was also ordered to complete 30 days of rehabilitation activity, was made the subject of a restraining order not to contact a list of people including Mr Osborne and Ms Rogers, and was ordered to pay prosecution costs of £1,630, plus a victim surcharge.
