Court of Appeal dismisses Dale Vince's libel appeal against Richard Tice over Hamas tweet

The Court of Appeal has dismissed Dale Vince's appeal in his libel claim against Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice, upholding a ruling that a tweet stating the green energy entrepreneur was "pro the murderous antisemitic Hamas" was a statement of opinion rather than fact.

Handing down judgement on 1 July 2026, Lord Justice Warby, with whom Lord Justice Coulson and Lord Justice Lewison agreed, rejected both grounds of appeal against a trial of preliminary issues decided by Pepperall J in the Media and Communications List.

The claim arose from a chain of publications following an October 2023 Times Radio interview in which Vince, a major Labour Party donor, remarked that "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist" when discussing the Palestinian situation. In March 2024, the Guido Fawkes website published an article and an accompanying tweet referencing the interview, and Tice quote-tweeted that material adding his own comment: "So major Labour donor is pro the murderous antisemitic Hamas ... Mmmm."

At the preliminary issues trial, Pepperall J found that the natural and ordinary meaning of Tice's tweet was that Vince supports Hamas, that this was a statement of opinion, and that the tweet indicated the basis for that opinion by reference to the quoted material and video clip. Vince appealed on two grounds, first that the statement should have been found to be one of fact throughout, and second, in the alternative, that even if it was opinion, the judge should have incorporated separate defamatory factual allegations, drawn from the quoted Guido Fawkes material, into the meaning found.

Warby LJ emphasised that appellate courts exercise considerable restraint when reviewing findings on meaning and on the fact or opinion distinction, since these are matters of impression for the trial judge that will rarely be disturbed absent a legal error, citing Stocker v Stocker and Blake v Fox. On the first ground, the court held that Pepperall J had correctly focused on Tice's own words as read in the context of the quoted tweet, rather than treating the entire chain of publications, including the underlying newspaper article, as a single statement to be assessed indiscriminately. The judge was entitled to conclude that the tweet followed a recognisable "quote tweet" format in which the sender presents extraneous material as fact before offering commentary upon it, a structure the court had previously discussed in Blake v Fox.

The second ground fared no better. Vince sought to argue for the first time on appeal that the tweet, by repeating unqualified defamatory factual allegations originally published by Guido Fawkes, invoked the established "repetition rule" so as to fix Tice with responsibility for those factual imputations regardless of his own opinion. The court found this represented a fundamentally new case, inconsistent with how the claim had been pleaded and argued below, where counsel for Vince had expressly disclaimed reliance on the wider material and maintained that Tice's own words had "done the damage". Applying the principles governing new points on appeal from Notting Hill Finance Ltd v Sheikh, the court declined to permit the amendment needed to advance this case, noting the absence of any application to amend, any supporting evidence, or any adequate explanation for the change of position, and observing that parallel claims against other defendants had included the alternative meaning now sought to be revived.

The appeal was dismissed on both grounds.