The Apprentice star and multi-millionaire’s pursuit of journalist Quentin Letts is yet another example of how England’s defamation laws favour the rich and powerful, says Toby Young

Should the rich and powerful be able to make use of Britain’s libel laws to silence their critics? A couple of weeks ago, the journalist Quentin Letts received a letter from Herbert Smith solicitors threatening him with a libel suit on behalf of Alan Sugar for remarks he had made during an interview on LBC radio on 20 July. Letts had questioned Sugar’s aptitude and ability for his new place in the House of Lords. According to the letter, Sugar would issue a writ against the journalist unless he paid his legal costs to date, donated a sum of money to charity and agreed to give a written undertaking never to criticise him again.

This last demand may come as a shock to some people, but not to me. I received a similar letter from law firm Theodore Goddard in 1998, acting on behalf of former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans. He was objecting to a piece I’d written in the Spectator about his departure from publishers Random House. Like Quentin, I was threatened with a libel suit unless I paid his lawyer’s fees and donated some money to charity, though he asked for more than simply a promise that I wouldn’t criticise him in future. He wanted me to give a written undertaking that I would never again write about him or his wife Tina Brown. It wasn’t the first time Evans had used this tactic. He made a similar demand of Richard Ingrams as a condition of not suing Private Eye.

I was lucky in that Evans’s solicitor also wrote to the Spectator, demanding a retraction and an apology. That meant I was able to persuade the magazine to join its case to mine and we were represented by the same solicitor, with the magazine picking up all the fees. I refused to give the undertaking Evans was demanding and the editor of the Spectator at the time, Frank Johnson, stood behind me. We didn’t give in to a single one of his demands and, after the deadline had expired, no writ was forthcoming.

Quentin Letts is in a more precarious position because Alan Sugar has not threatened LBC. That means there is no deep-pocketed company he can join his case to. It is just him against a man who, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, is worth £730m.

When journalists have been sued by public figures in the past — particularly members of Parliament, as Sugar now is — the convention has been to sue the newspaper or broadcaster that provided them with a platform, not to go after them personally. In this way, potential abuses of Britain’s libel laws have been kept in check (to an extent) since few individual journalists can afford to fight a legal battle on their own. However, Sugar has dispensed with this convention. If Letts decides to fight the case he faces potentially ruinous costs — and even if he wins he will be lucky to recover two-thirds of them.

The absence of a First Amendment in Britain means that we depend to a great extent on the observance of legal convention to preserve our freedom of speech. If Parliamentarians are now going to threaten to sue individual journalists personally, members of the press will be inhibited from freely expressing their opinions about them in future.

This is a grave development and one that all journalists should be concerned about, particularly as more and more of us are going freelance. Anyone who cares about free speech in this country should write to Alan Sugar, c/o the House of Lords, and urge him to drop the case.

Read more from Toby Young at www.nosacredcows.co.uk