[Some
images added by this website] London,
Friday, April 25, 2008 Legal
victory for B&B owner who evicted Irving for
being too moody By Cahal Milmo and Aline
Nassif In his long history of legal
calamity, David Irving has confronted and
lost to courtroom adversaries from the publisher
Penguin, to a British Second World War convoy
commander, to the Austrian state. To that list can
now be added Jennie Allen, the 60-year-old
owner of a B&B in the genteel London suburb of
Kew. Amid claim and counter-claim about boorish
behaviour and an eviction made with the help of two
police officers, the 69-year-old writer, who was
famously described by a High Court judge in 2000 as
an "active Holocaust denier... anti-Semitic and
racist", went to Wandsworth County Court this week
to claim that Mrs Allen had wrongly asked him to
leave her premises [on
July 4, 2007] while he was
researching his latest tome. But in a pattern which must be becoming grimly
familiar to the much-criticised historian, the
judge dismissed his claim for £2,000 in
damages for breach of contract after finding that
diverging interpretations by Mr Irving and his
landlady of her terms and conditions meant she had
been within her rights to ask him to leave. He was
ordered to pay Mrs Allen £60 towards her costs
and her bus fare to the
court. David
Irving comments: | LOSING two libel
actions, one as plaintiff, the other as
defendant, in thirty years is not a bad
record for a cutting-edge historian, I
suppose. What journalists do not
learn of, unfortunately, are the legal
actions I have won, because the
final settlement -- known oddly as a
Tomlin Order -- imposes a gag on both
parties. When journalists
mention the political imprisonment in
Austria, hoping to get mileage out of
that, I retort: "If you were a reader,
which historian would you be more inclined
to trust: the Andrew Roberts type, who
conforms seamlessly with established
history; or the historian whom foreign
governments imprison for the history he
writes?" A well-written article,
all the same, and fair too -- although I
note that Cahal Milmo decides not
to mention that the
dragon lady's hollow "victory" cost her
over £5,000 in legal costs -- to
the judge's (and my) surprise, she came to
court armed to the teeth with solicitor
and barrister. Rather like Deborah
Lipstadt, whose Pyrrhic "victory" in
the High Court ultimately cost her, her
publisher Penguin Books, and her Hollywood
friends $13 million. |
Mr Irving, who was sentenced
to three years' imprisonment by an Austrian judge
in 2006 for remarks he made in 1989 claiming
there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz
(views he has now revised), had booked a two-week
stay last July at Mrs Allen's bed and breakfast,
Melbury, so he could visit the nearby National
Archives in Kew, used by thousands of academics
every year to study government documents. But, within four days of his arrival at the
£300-a-week guest house, relations between the
researcher and his host, who has been running
B&Bs for 35 years, had deteriorated
dramatically. Mrs Allen declined to comment in detail on the
case when contacted yesterday but said she was
pleased that the court had found in her favour. She said: "Mr Irving's behaviour was such that I
considered it upsetting for myself and my guests. I
asked him to leave and he said he would sue me for
breach of contract. I won the case because the
judge determined there had been no contract between
us. I'm delighted to have won." Court documents seen by
The Independent show that Mrs Allen
believed Mr Irving was unjustifiably moody
throughout his stay, unsettling her other guests
and behaving rudely towards her. In her
statement to the court, she alleged that the
scholar said "get out of my sight you evil
witch" during a row over his conduct. Mr Irving "strenuously denied" making the remark
or being guilty of any "abusive or intimidating
behaviour" towards the other guests at Melbury. He
said in his statement of claim to the court that he
had only two brief conversations with those in the
B&B and spent most of the time in his room or
at the National Archives. The saga came to a head on 4 July last year when
Mrs Allen said that, after repeated refusals by Mr
Irving to accept her request to leave, she was
forced to call police to ask him to end his stay.
The historian claimed his landlady only cooled
towards him after her solicitor sent her a copy of
his Wikipedia entry detailing his views and
controversies. Mrs Allen, who emphasised she has
never before clashed with a guest and has a long
list of repeat visitors to her B&B, denied the
claim. In
his statement, Mr Irving said he agreed to leave
within two hours of the arrival of the two
officers, packing his belongings shortly after 5pm.
He added: "I remarked in a conversational tone that
no doubt we would next meet in court." At the hearing this week, Mr Irving was told his
claim for breach of contract was invalid because
both he and Mrs Allen held diverging views of a
clause in her terms and conditions which guaranteed
a guest's stay for one night only. The landlady
argued this meant she was entitled to ask a guest
to leave after a single night. The historian was sanguine about his latest
legal setback. "The judge found there was no case
to answer," he said. "But I very strongly reject
the suggestion that I behaved obnoxiously." Mr
Irving was once a respected authority on Nazi
Germany until he made clear views on the
Holocaust which led to his defeat in an
1996 libel case against the author Deborah
Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin. His
£1million Mayfair flat was seized to meet the
costs awarded against him from the case. The writer lost his
first libel case in 1970 when the commander of a
British convoy claimed Mr Irving unfairly blamed
him for its heavy losses. He most recently hit
headlines when he sought to address
the Oxford Union with the BNP leader, Nick
Griffin. He is hoping to change his luck with two other
lawsuits surrounding the aftermath of the 1996
libel trial. In the meantime, he is working on an
autobiography, entitled As I Lay There
Drowning. Photos
above: The landlady claimed she had provided a
writing desk and chair for the 6-foot 2, 238-pound
historian. Grinning, she personally supervised the
eviction. She was not grinning when she left
court. -
-
-
David
Irving's witness statement in the
action
. . . and
she has to pay £5,000
costs]
|