The Lord McAlpine scandal – in which the Conservative peer was falsely implicated in the apparent sexual abuse of children at a North Wales care home – proved extremely costly to the BBC, ITV, Sally Bercow and others.
One person who dodged an expensive defamation action was Guardian columnist and environmental activist George Monbiot – despite the fact he wrote tweets in November 2012 suggesting McAlpine was linked to the alleged paedophilia.
Monbiot’s tweets, now deleted, included these words posted to his 55,000 Twitter followers: “I looked up Lord #McAlpine on t’internet. It says the strangest things. I can confirm that Lord #McAlpine was Conservative Party Treasurer when Mrs Thatcher was prime minister”.
Monbiot later apologised for naming McAlpine but it turns out that, almost four years later, he may not be off the hook altogether.
Though I didn't make direct allegations, I think I was wrong to hve mentiond McAlpine on Twittr, as contribtd to febrile atmos. I apologise.
— GeorgeMonbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) November 9, 2012
Monbiot only avoided being sued by McAlpine after agreeing in March 2013 with the peer’s solicitors, RMPI, what he called an “unprecedented” settlement.
Monbiot explained its terms on his blog: “They [RMPI] would like me to carry out, over the next three years, work on behalf of three charities of my choice whose value amounts to £25,000.”
McAlpine died in January 2014 aged 71.
Monbiot has now admitted to Heat Street that he volunteered for only two charities – Trees For Life; and Wide Horizons Outdoor Education Trust.
And Heat Street can also reveal that he has just been reported to the Charity Commission for allegedly causing financial loss to the second of these charities, Wide Horizons.
IT expert and writer Paul Horgan has complained to the commission because he is concerned that Wide Horizons “has not received thousands of pounds in value in the form of voluntary work over a period of three years pledged by Mr George Monbiot.”
Horgan maintains that Monbiot agreed to do £12,500 unpaid work for this charity – the equivalent of 800 hours at about £16 per hour; 400 hours at £32 per hour; or 200 hours at £64 per hour.
On his Charity Commission complaint form, sent on 19 July, Mr Horgan writes: “In effect, the charity may have lost thousands of pounds of value through missing benefits in kind that Mr Monbiot pledged to deliver to escape a lawsuit.
“If Mr Monbiot was to perform unpaid work for the charity over a period of three years to the value of £12,500, this could have amounted to many hours of work… I am concerned that the Chief Executive [of Wide Horizons] is not exercising a sufficient duty of care to ensure that Mr Monbiot made good on his pledge to deliver approximately £12,500 of value to the charity.”
Mr Horgan goes on: “He [the chief executive] has stated to me that it is ‘impossible’ to ‘quantify financially’ the work performed by Mr Monbiot. However, since the pledge was for Mr Monbiot to provide work to a financial value, the Chief Executive should be able to quantify this work.
“It should not be impossible for him to do so and to state that it is impossible is a failure of duty of care. The consequence of this is that there is a possibility that the charity has lost out value to its operations and balance sheet costing up to £12,500 as a result of not managing Mr Monbiot’s time and activities in a professional and competent fashion.
“This would be the equivalent of about 800 hours of work by my estimation, unless the value of the work performed by Mr Monbiot was determined to be higher. So far no valuation of the work performed by Mr Monbiot exclusively for the charity has been provided.”
When Heat Street asked Monbiot about this, he said he was recovering from dental surgery but would respond to our detailed questions by email.
At the time of publication, he had not done so.
There is no doubt that Monbiot did some volunteer work with Wide Horizons because he wrote about it on his blog in 2013, but how many hours in total did he do? We don’t know because Monbiot has failed to tell us.
Andrew Reid, McAlpine’s solicitor, said he was unable to comment because of “client confidentiality”.
When he’s recovered from his trip to the dentist, we hope to hear what Monbiot has to say.
