‘FORMER MP Andrew Bridgen’s libel claim against Matt Hancock can go to trial, a High Court judge has ruled as she refused the former health secretary’s bid to end the claim’, the Independent reported on Monday.
The case concerns a video that Hancock (Conservative Health Secretary from 2018 to 2021) shared on social media of Bridgen asking a question in the House of Commons, which he captioned: ‘The disgusting and dangerous antisemitic, anti-vax, anti-scientific conspiracy theories spouted by a sitting MP this morning are unacceptable and have absolutely no place in our society.’
The sitting MP he was referring to was Andrew Bridgen. What exactly had Mr Bridgen done to provoke such a vituperatively worded condemnation? Well, sharing a link to an article concerning data about deaths and other adverse reactions linked to covid vaccines Bridgen had commented: ‘As one consultant cardiologist said to me, this is the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.’ A comment as a result of which he had the Conservative Whip removed. However he not just stuck by his comment but criticised the government for actively looking to remove MPs who questioned the safety of coronavirus vaccines. And Jews who did not regard his quote as anti-semitic in any way came to his defence.
Bridgen sued Hancock for libel.
On Monday came the news that Hancock had lost his High Court attempt to end Bridgen’s libel claim. It was widely reported. Strangely, however, no mainstream outlet chose to seek or quote Bridgen’s own response to this ‘win’ although, as he tweeted, he had put out a press release immediately the judgement was handed down to all the media. (The full press release is at the end of this article.)
Mr Hancock had sought to get this libel case thrown out and, at a hearing last month, asked the court in London to rule in his favour before a trial, an application Bridgen opposed. In her judgment on Monday, Mrs Justice Collins Rice dismissed Hancock’s bid. It was a significant ‘win’ for Bridgen. Given this successful outcome for him you’d have thought the press would be eager to hear his response. After all, pre ‘covid’ this former MP was one that MSM couldn’t get enough of – it was his quote they wanted whatever the topic was. Today it seems he is persona non grata.
What are they so nervous of? Is it because if Bridgen is proved right then they will be shown to have been wrong? Is it because it takes them too close for comfort to the ‘real’ story behind the libel case – their own culpability from the start in ignoring Andrew Bridgen’s heroic and essentially one-man stand in Parliament against the Government’s reckless and injurious mass covid vaccine policy? Despite the fact as one TCW reader put it at the time: ‘It’s not often (never these days) that you can put the words “brave” and “UK MP” in the same sentence. But have we just witnessed one brave MP speaking out about the unprecedented human harm done by the mRNA Covid vaccine, and his call to have it halted immediately? It seems that MP Andrew Bridgen is just such a guy.’
He was referring to Bridgen’s first major speech on the subject In Parliament in December 2022.
‘Notice the virtually empty chamber when he brings this subject up’, our reader went on. ‘Cowardly MPs decided they didn’t even want to be present when Andrew delivered his scathing attack on what the political, medical and mainstream media establishment had pushed (or kept silent) over the last two and a half years.’
Did this remarkable speech prompt the MSM into reporting the great unspoken issue of the year, vaccine injury? That was the question I asked at the time. No. The tragedy is that it did not: ‘The media mirrored the empty chamber. Bridgen’s call for an immediate halt to the Covid vaccines has been ignored by all main newspapers bar the Express‘, I wrote. ‘And the Express’s report focused on what it deemed to be the most newsworthy angle – Bridgen’s ‘use of’ Parliamentary privilege to make ‘a bombshell allegation’ that a senior member of the British Heart Foundation had covered up a report showing ‘the mRNA covid vaccine increases inflammation of the heart arteries’, not the overall issue of the safety of the vaccines.
Yet but for that speech covid vaccines might have been routinely recommended for under 12 year olds.
Andrew persisted valiantly in his quest to expose the truth despite Parliament and the MSM cold shouldering him. After fielding 20 rejections he finally succeeded in raising the topic of excess deaths in the Chamber. Again, as we reported at the time, this veritable tour de force on the data was delivered once again to an almost empty Commons chamber, although the public gallery was full. (The few MPs who did attend and participate should be remembered – Sir Christopher Chope, Philip Davies, Danny Kruger and Esther McVey all spoke, and spoke well.)
The point is that the MSM have been negligent beyond belief in not following up on Bridgen’s serious, carefully researched and well-documented claims – investigative work they themselves should have been doing to hold the government to account. They chose to ignore him and as they have continued to ignore the catastrophic effect the government’s policy continues to have on individual and public health – that we have systematically documented on this site.
No wonder they don’t want to quote the politician who, alone among MPs, forced these unpalatable truths into Parliament. A man who was then demonised in a crude attempt to discredit him by Matt Hancock, one of the four men (the ‘quad’ of Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Michael Gove and Matt Hancock) most responsible for the entirely unnecessary vaccine ‘exit’ from lockdown.
Bridgen tells us in his tweet that the Telegraph had been interested in an interview with him before the result was known, but not now he has won the hearing.
I wonder why? Could it be that they are happy with Matt Hancock’s false characterisation of him as a conspiracy theorist and an anti-Semite? Is it convenient that the MP who most embarrassed the government over a policy that benefited only Big Pharma and its globalist ‘lockdown’ social control proponents remains discredited? As Andrew Bridgen says, ‘This case is not just me against @MattHancock, it’s really against Big Pharma and the World Economic Forum’? And, after all, Andrew Bridgen being on the right side of history, shows them to be very much in the wrong.
Andrew Bridgen’s press release:
Matt Hancock tried and failed to stop this libel claim reaching a trial in March 2024. Now his second attempt to stop this claim has failed in 2025. In her judgment handed down today, Mrs Justice Collins Rice dismissed Mr Hancock’s application seeking a termination ruling, and Mr Hancock has been ordered to pay £18,000 in legal costs within 14 days. The Court concluded that ‘This claim is . . . set to proceed to the full evidential stages and on to trial.’
In reaching that decision, the Court noted a number of serious problems with Mr Hancock’s position. Regarding Mr Hancock’s contention that the tweet labelling my actions antisemitic caused me no serious harm, Collins Rice J described the libel as a ‘relatively grave libel’, and accepted that this might well be a ‘mass publication case’. Collins Rice J also noted that Mr Hancock refuses to take the tweet down, noting: ‘the persistence of the publication to the present day’. The Court recognised my case that ‘“antisemitic in character” is a distinctively toxic and corrosive type of gall in a political context, an epithet understood to be so solemn, momentous and ultimately politically fatal as to be capable of being found at trial to be insufficiently pertinent’ to what I had tweeted. The Court recognised my case that ‘“antisemitic in character” crosses a line between fact-tethered opinion and gratuitous vituperative smear – in the wider context of a difference of political views about . . . the merits and motivations of the vaccination programmes’.
As to Mr Hancock’s honest opinion defence, the Judge noted that Mr Hancock was asking the court to terminate my claim but: ‘without his having either pleaded to or explained in evidence the genuine nature of his own belief’. In concluding there were compelling reasons for the case to go to trial, the Court rightly pointed out that the honest opinion defence does not cover ‘vituperative make believe’ and noted in particular ‘the Jewish doctors’ letter’ which said my tweet was not antisemitic and ‘criticised Mr Hancock for weaponizing the language of antisemitism to suppress vaccine criticism’. Collins Rice J also made reference to the Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav who was on record as ‘drawing parallels between the extreme and discriminatory public health meansure during the pandemic and the Holocaust’.
The Court noted that Mr Hancock had not put before the Court evidence that ‘other respected commentators did consider it antisemitic in character, or that similar utterances have been so regarded on other occasions’ noting that ‘That is evidence not at present before the Court’. On the contrary the Court noted that: ‘other commentators of comparable stature did not do, and were perhaps careful not to . . . condemn Mr Bridgen in precisely the way Mr Hancock did’.
The Court noted that ‘simply setting out the nature of the disputed issues demonstrates its highly evaluative character . . . not a matter to be rushed on an interlocutory basis’.
Mr Hancock’s previous comments about ‘an absurd libel case he will undoubtedly lose’ now look like the expensively created bluster that they always were.
We disagree with one comment in the Court’s judgment about the consequences of Mr Hancock not pleading the defence of ‘truth’ and we are considering whether to take that point to the Court of Appeal.
ANDREW BRIDGEN
