Yesterday, Sally Bercow and Lord McAlpine battled it out at the High Court, because – for those who can’t remember – Lord McAlpine is suing Sally for the following tweet that she posted in November last year, at the height of the post-Savile paedo-hunt:

I couldn’t get a larger photo, but for those who can’t quite make it out, the tweet says: “Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *innocent face*”. That is what Sally posted on that evening, for her 56,000 followers to see.

A few important but obvious points to make:

Firstly, and most obviously, she did not say that McAlpine was a child abuser.

Nor did she say that he was alleged to be a child abuser. In fact, she mentioned no context whatsoever.

And finally, the fact is that McAlpine was indeed trending. Which means that thousands of people were already discussing him on Twitter that evening, and that Sally was, quite simply, commenting on the fact that his name was on the top trends list.

Lord McAlpine’s lawyer, Sir Edward Garnier, has claimed that Sally “was sarcastically pointing out that Lord McAlpine was trending and that he was trending because he was a paedophile”.

In particular he pointed out the *innocent face* bit, and asked the question: “What was the tweet about, if it was not a pointing the finger of blame at Lord McAlpine?”

I’d dispute both of these claims. Sir Garnier seems to suggest that Sally was suggesting that McAlpine is “a paedophile”. However, this is nonsense; it makes much more sense to interpret it as Sally simply mentioning that McAlpine was being suggested as an alleged paedophile. It is perfectly possible to read the tweet without assuming that Sally was definitively saying “he is a paedophile”.

In fact, one could even suggest that Sally may not have known why he was actually trending, but had a ‘gut feeling’ that perhaps it was linked to the high-profile speculation regarding alleged child abusers. Of course, I doubt that this scenario applied to Mrs Bercow, as she was very much ‘in tune’ with social media at the time. But for any ordinary member of the public – without any special insight or news-savviness – wouldn’t the question that Sally tweeted have essentially been a valid question to ask? Just because Sally is somewhat of a semi-celebrity, should it make a difference as to how we approach it?

Anyway. You can see that, already, we can go from Sir Garnier’s suggestion that (1) “Sally was saying that McAlpine was definitely a paedophile“…

…and we can narrow this down to (2) “Sally was merely suggesting that he could be a paedophile (without knowing/saying for certain that he actually was) because loads of people were discussing him on Twitter“…

…and – at a stretch – you can even take it a step further and say that it is entirely possible (albeit extremely unlikely) that (3) “Sally didn’t know anything about McAlpine being an alleged paedophile, but she saw his name tweeting and started to wonder if there was a connection, and so she cheekily asked her followers for more information“.

Of course, spreading the suggestion that he could be a paedophile (or even mentioning that others were suggesting that he could be) has it’s own problems too, in regards to libel law. But it is a far cry from the Lord McAlpine and Sir Garnier’s suggestions at the High Court that Sally was actually saying “yes, Lord McAlpine is definitely a paedophile”. In fact, the idea that it could’ve been interpreted in such a way had not even crossed my mind until I read the news reports yesterday evening. I had always assumed that option (2) from the list above was the most applicable and likely one – that it was always intended as a suggestion, never a statement.

And of course, this was not without good reason – for those in the know, BBC’s Newsnight planned to name him that evening, but in the end they decided not to. Although this does not defend her behaviour, it’s worth remembering that it’s not unreasonable to assume that if the BBC are planning to broadcast an allegation, then the allegation almost definitely exists. Indeed, the allegation did exist. And as far as I can see, Sally did nothing more than simply refer to the existence of the allegation.

She made no suggestion that it was a justified allegation. No suggestion of guilt on his part. And certainly no suggestion that she had any sort of proof or evidence to suggest that McAlpine was guilty or innocent. She merely said what everybody else could see in their own ‘Trending’ sidebar. Anyone who saw his name could have seen what the rest of the world were saying about him, with one simple click. Anybody could’ve done it, with or without Sally’s encouragement. I bet there was an extremely minimal difference in the overall number of people who viewed the allegations flying around on Twitter thanks to Sally’s tweet, because anyone who was remotely interested in Lord McAlpine trending (visibly, in the sidebar) would have gone ahead and checked it out for themselves.

On a final note, whether Sally is found guilty or not, it’s still quite absurd that she was scapegoated and chased in such a manner. At the time, Sally had 56,000 followers. Maybe a couple of thousand of her followers would’ve been online at the time, and would actually have seen the tweet pop up in their timeline. Her contribution to the frenzied discussions about Lord McAlpine would not have made a particularly huge difference to the fact that there were tens of thousands of people already discussing his name at the time – hence why it was trending in the first place! Sally certainly can’t be blamed for causing the speculation to ‘spread like wildfire’, or anything like that – because the speculation was rife before she even chipped in.

In addition to this, it ought to be remembered that Sally quickly removed the tweet, publicly apologised to her followers, and even wrote a direct apology to Lord McAlpine. That’s a lot more of an apology than he would’ve received from the thousands of others people who tweeted about him on that evening, and yet he chose to pursue this case – even refusing to settle out of court – and took it all the way to the High Court.

Can’t help but feel this is an excessive and drawn-out punishment for somehow who merely made a factual observation about what other Twitter users were discussing on that evening. An excessive punishment indeed.

All comments welcome.