The Daily Mail’s tedious and unfunny churnalist Richard Littlejohn has today outdone his picking on the disabled, as he suggests that a man who lost the sight of one eye should not have redress against those responsible. It’s only an accident, tells Dick, and infers that the person concerned should have claimed on his insurance and got over it.
This is, reckons Dick, just another example of “elf’n’safety gone mad”. But it isn’t: personal injury litigation does not depend on health and safety law, and has been going on as long as there has been a legal system in the UK, so that’ll take us back a few hundred years, then. And an award of around £400k for losing the sight of one eye – for good – should not surprise anyone.
Hypocrisy, guv? Go see a doctor, innit?!?
Indeed, Dick knows all about measuring his dosh in hundreds of thousands of pounds, given that he trousered around a million notes a year as far back as 2005. Six years later, who knows how much of the green folding stuff is being chucked at him to keep him happy? His legendarily foul mouthed editor had a remuneration package of a whopping £2.8 million last year.
So Dick has no room to quibble about a £400k injury payout. And nor does he have any room to complain about folks resorting to litigation: back in 2005, he decided to jump ship from the Super Soaraway Currant Bun before his contract ended. The twinkle-toed yet domestically combative Rebekah Brooks, then editing the rag, found adversely on this move and vetoed it.
From there, the tug-of-hack between News International and Associated Newspapers went to litigation – that’s the kind of thing that Dick isn’t happy for others to do. Every media watcher willed the dispute to come to court. Sadly, all were disappointed as a settlement was reached. It was even described as “amicable”. A no win, no fun arrangement, then.
Thus another tale of routine hypocrisy from Littlejohn. I’m sure that Florida compound is a nice, warm and secure place for the poor soul to count the latest hundred thousand – and he has the advantage of being able to see all that lovely lolly with both eyes.
Mind how you go.
Ignoring the utter legal illiteracy of saying that the club was "found guilty of negligence" , conflating as it does civil and criminal law into some grotesque hybrid, para [36] of Lord Brailsford's opinion expressly states that the value of the claim had been agreed in advance by ALL parties, viz. "As I indicated at the outset quantum has been agreed in this case. ...the agreement on quantum is contained in a Joint Minute (no.25 of process). That Joint Minute contained agreed sums for various heads of claim, and, further, agreed figures for interest to 4 October 2011."
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