Reform UK’s new mega-donor Ben Delo gave a £350,000 loan to a conservative writer fighting a legal case in which a judge later found she had engaged in online bullying and regrettable conduct with a “whiff of threat and antisemitism”. Nina Power and her friend, the writer Daniel DC Miller, brought the legal action for defamation against the performance artist Luke Turner, who they had accused of falsely calling them antisemitic. At the same time, Turner brought a counter-claim against the pair accusing them of harassment.
Their libel action failed on the grounds that Turner’s online reach was not big enough to have caused harm to their reputations, while the harassment case also failed on the basis that their conduct was not unlawful. The loan from Delo to help fund Power’s case before the 2023 trial shines a light on the Reform supporter’s involvement in backing a landmark legal tussle over the boundaries of free speech. It is understood Delo did not and does not believe Power and Miller held antisemitic views as alleged by Turner, and would never knowingly provide financial or any other support to those who did.
In the case, Miller, who is Jewish, and Power denied promoting fascist or antisemitic views, and said they did not know Turner was Jewish. The judge found there was “no overt antisemitism” displayed by the pair. But in the counter-claim of harassment, the judge described social media posts by Miller and Power as having “the whiff of threat and antisemitism which they themselves can fairly be held to have created”, although she ruled it was “too occasional, intangible, diffuse and unconsolidated” to have been unlawful.
She said the “radio frequencies of macabre imagery and casualness around antisemitic tropes into which Mr Turner tuned do yield a discernible signal but not one strong enough to be recognised objectively as antisemitic hate speech or a resolved engagement with physical violence sufficient to render this conduct quasi-criminal”. The judge also said: “Mr Turner evidently had been harassed to a quasi-criminal (or indeed criminal) degree by other people. But what Mr Miller and Ms Power did was not of that order.” It has not been previously reported that Delo, a billionaire who recently contributed £36m to Nigel Farage’s party, gave funding to Power before the case went to court.
After the failure of the cases, Turner was awarded costs of £1m amounting to 80% of the total, and Power was declared bankrupt. In the course of the bankruptcy proceedings it emerged that Delo had loaned her a sum in the region of £350,000, secured against the value of a London property that she owns, to help pay her lawyers. It is understood the loan was made by Delo weeks before the trial started when her conditional fee arrangement with her lawyers collapsed.
The loan was made on a commercial basis and secured against the value of her property, with a repayment schedule. Delo has previously been known to be a supporter of the Free Speech Union, run by the Conservative peer Toby Young, and has funded a base known for anti-woke causes. Power is a former leftwing academic who has written in publications including the Guardian about feminism.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
