Hain faced criminal libel prosecution
Official papers released yesterday show that Peter Hain, Labour’s Leader of the House of Commons and Secretary of State for Wales, was almost prosecuted under an arcane criminal libel procedure in the 1970s for publicising a sex scandal involving an MP.
In 1973, Peter Hain was a leading figure in the Young Liberals and the editor of the radical journal Liberator.
A sex scandal had broken earlier that year, revealing that a number of Ministers had consorted with prostitutes. The Lord Privy Seal Lord Jellicoe and defence minister Lord Lambton had resigned as a result.
However, one of the prostitutes involved, Norma Levy, had told police that other ministers were involved – and Mr Hain named one of them as Geoffrey Rippon in his magazine.
Papers released from the national archives yesterday include a series of letters between the prime minister Edward Heath’s principal private secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, and Tony Hetherington, the attorney general’s legal adviser.
Sir Robert warned that there was little point in prosecuting Mr Hain for libel, as he would be unlikely to be able to pay any costs, let alone damages.
Instead, the civil servant proposed prosecution for criminal libel – a little-known and rarely-invoked offence used in cases where a libel is so serious as to be likely to cause a breach of the peace.
Sir Robert proposed using this as a test case for a revival of the law, in instances where ” the purpose of the libel was not just to defame an individual but to bring institutions into disrepute and thus, in the end, disturb the peace of the community.”
The matter was apparently dropped however.
Mr Hain joined the Labour Party in 1977, and was elected to Parliament as MP for Neath in 1991.
