Justice Nicklin’s ruling in the defamation case between Rachel Riley and Laura Murray has been published. The Countdown presenter has won the first round of her libel case against the former Corbyn aide. It is a quite convoluted Twitter spat from March 2019, when Ms Riley and Ms Murray exchanged tweets after Mr Corbyn was egged on a visit to the Finsbury Park Mosque in north London.

Ms Riley tweeted an image of another Tweet by Owen Jones, about an earlier time when former British National Party leader Nick Griffin was egged. Owen’s tweet said: “I think sound life advice is, if you don’t want eggs thrown at you, don’t be a Nazi.” Murray responded in a tweet that Rachel Riley was “as dangerous as she is stupid” and that “no one should engage with her”.

Murray went on “Today Jeremy Corbyn went to his local mosque for Visit My Mosque Day, and was attacked by a Brexiteer.” adding for good measure “Rachel Riley tweets that Corbyn deserves to be violently attacked because he is a Nazi.” Riley, who is Jewish and has been an outspoken critic of the Labour party’s management of antisemitism complaints, is suing Murray for £50,000 in damages, calling her words “an appalling distortion of the truth”. Murray claimed she was simply expressing an opinion in the tweet and it was not defamatory. The judge ruled it should go ahead for a full defamation hearing. The arguments were quite complicated and you can read the full ruling here.

Laura Murray, who Guido kids you not, now manages complaints against Labour for the party, will now have to prove that it is true that Rachel Riley would support violent action against Mr Corbyn or possibly lose £50,000. Do not worry that Laura Murray is a penniless Corbynista up against a rich celebrity, she is the daughter of Andrew Murray, the aristo communist Corbyn adviser and her mother finances the Communist Party. She gave Laura a £1.3 million home, neatly avoiding inheritance tax. So if Murray loses, she can just sell the property…