At last, good sense prevails. The Barclay brothers have withdrawn their criminal libel claim in France against The Times's editor Robert Thomson and media editor Dan Sabbagh. It should never have been launched in the first place, of course, and they were right to step back from the brink.
It's obvious that they negotiated an out-of-court deal to avoid the trial that was due later this year. There is a clarification-cum-apology at the foot of the paper's business briefs column today (on page 61 if you have the newsprint version). It underlines that the November 2004 article that upset the Telegraph group owners, Sirs David and Frederick Barclay, was not meant to suggest, "as some people may have understood it," that they "exploit vulnerable people in financial difficulty in an underhand and unfair way for commercial gain".
Well, the original article certainly wasn't the nicest thing anyone has read about themselves, but that's beside the point. It was the use of the French courts to pursue an action which was so controversial. The Times sells very few copies in France, after all, so few people would have had the chance to read the offending story. Once a Paris judge decided that the case could be dealt with within its jurisdiction a compromise was always likely. My understanding is that no money changed hands, however, so the "clarification" was good enough to sort it out. But the episode does raise questions about the problems that papers - and, especially, their websites - face in future.
Lawyers for the Barclays argued they were seeking redress in France rather than in Britain because the legal system was "quicker" and more "efficient". They did not say, of course, that the chances of victory were greater in France than Britain. But surely that was their initial feeling (though we'll never know now how good a defence The Times would have put up).
With British papers increasingly extending their sales abroad into different jurisdictions, with different laws and/or requiring different levels of proof with different sets of precedents, there is always a danger of running into unforeseen trouble.
What was particularly bad form about the Barclay twins' action was the fact that they are newspaper owners. They ought to be fighting for press freedom rather than constricting it by sueing a rival. Then again, they required me to depart from their employment last year because they believe that newspapers should not write about newspapers. So I'm not that surprised.
