Court of Appeals hands Dale Vince landmark victory over Daily Mail’s misleading ‘sex pest’ headline

The Daily Mail may recently have celebrated a legal victory in its privacy case against Prince Harry and other high-profile claimants, but this week the newspaper found itself on the losing side of another major media law case.

Green energy entrepreneur and Labour donor Dale Vince has won a landmark Court of Appeal ruling after Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail, used his photograph alongside a headline about a different Labour donor accused of sexual harassment.

The case stems from an article published in June 2023. Online, it ran the headline: “Labour repays £100,000 to sex pest donor.” In print, the wording was slightly different, referring to a “sex harassment donor.” In both versions, however, the article was illustrated with prominent photographs of Vince, including one in which his face was circled, despite the headline having nothing to do with him.

The donor referred to in the headline was in fact City financier Davide Serra, whose £100,000 donation to Labour was returned after allegations of sexual harassment emerged. Vince was not mentioned until the fourth paragraph of the story, which stated: “And Labour faced further embarrassment yesterday when businessman Dale Vince, who has donated £1.5m to the party, joined an eco-protest in London with Just Stop Oil, the group he is helping to bankroll.”

As Press Gazette reports, the online version of the article was corrected after just 47 minutes, with Vince’s photographs replaced by images of Serra. However, the original version remained available through PressReader until October 2023.

Vince initially brought a libel claim against Associated Newspapers. That claim was struck out by the High Court in July 2024 after the judge ruled that a defamation action must be assessed by considering the article as a whole, rather than the headline in isolation.

Vince subsequently pursued a claim under data protection law, arguing that his personal data had been processed unfairly. That case was also dismissed by the High Court in 2025, with the judge concluding that Vince had “no real prospect” of success.

The Court of Appeal has now overturned that decision, granting summary judgment in Vince’s favour and awarding him damages in what is understood to be the first successful claim of its kind under UK data protection law.

Central to the judgment was the newspaper’s failure to comply with the fairness principle underpinning data protection law. The court also referred to the Editors’ Code of Practice, enforced by press regulator IPSO, of which the Daily Mail is a member, which states that newspapers must “‘take care not to publish … misleading … information or images, including headlines not supported by the text’, which goes beyond the accuracy obligation.”

The judges concluded: “Associated Newspapers, in this case, failed to take care not to publish misleading information and images in the articles. The information in the headline juxtaposed next to the images of Mr Vince would have misled many casual readers into thinking that Mr Vince was the ‘sex harassment donor’ referred to.”

During the case, Daily Mail night editor Andrew Gregory defended the layout decision, arguing that the stories had been combined because of “the constraints of space in the paper” and because he “did not want two articles about two Labour donors on two different pages.”

He insisted he had been “in no way attempting to mislead the reader into thinking the donor pictured was the ‘sex harassment’ individual. Indeed the text of the story very carefully sets out that he wasn’t.”

The Court of Appeal rejected that explanation, describing it as “unconvincing.”

Responding to the ruling, Vince said the judgment would have far-reaching consequences for newspaper publishing. “It sounds grand, because it is – headlines won’t be the same again after this ruling. Not just headlines but articles too,” he said.

“Three years ago the Mail ran a highly misleading headline, using pictures of me in a headline not about me. It was a damaging reputational attack. The Daily Mail thought they could get away with it because they were protected by a libel law that was so old, it almost predated the internet. They were wrong.”

“From today newspaper headlines will never be the same again – because media outlets have a new duty of fairness and we the people have a new means to enforce it. Something so many of our media outlets fail to do voluntarily to their great shame is now not a choice. The Daily Mail faces substantial costs and damages, but worse than that for them is this new duty of fairness – that throws their current business model out of the window.”