Willing to litigate until the cows come home (and before his own personal chickens come home to roost) the late Lord McAlpine was a staunch defender of people’s reputations – provided they did not work for him in the construction industry. The 256 workers blacklisted by McAlpine took twenty years to clear their names, while it took the Lord just ten minutes on Twitter to clear his.
One lawyer observed: ‘Admittedly Lord McAlpine owned paintings by Graham Ovenden – work that even the Tate Gallery thought was as dodgy as f$ck – but it doesn’t mean he was into anything illegal. By contrast anyone moaning about minimum wages or health and safety on a building site, is clearly some kind of deviant’.