Web site altered to support copyright lies of former MP

Rupert Allason, former Tory MP for Torbay, sued the publisher Random House, claiming that the copyright in the autobiography belonged to him and that Random House should split the profits with him. Allason argued that he ghost-wrote the book for John Cairncross, and/or that Cairncross wrote the book and had orally assigned the British rights in the book to him to evade the publishing restrictions placed on former Foreign Office employees.

The court noted that Allason’s two arguments were inconsistent with each other: “In one John Cairncross was not an author, while in the second he was.” Pointing to evidence from Random House of manuscripts and material written by Cairncross himself, the court decided that the ghost writing argument “was quite hopeless.”

During the proceedings, Allason said in evidence that he was not a director of St. Ermin’s Press, another publishing company which had entered into negotiations with Cairncross for rights to the book. He described himself as a consultant. However, when the judge in the case, Mr Justice Laddie, checked its web site when arguments in the case had finished, but before making his decision, he found Allason named as “editorial director”. By the following day, the description on the site had been changed to read “editorial consultant.” Mr Justice Laddie called Allason, who has brought 17 libel actions in his lifetime, “one of the most dishonest witnesses I have ever seen” and passed the case details to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

The court also rejected Allason’s argument that the copyright in the work had been orally assigned to him, believing it to be “wholly untrue” and invented by Allason “when he realised that his claim to be sole author had no prospect of being believed.”