George Galloway has won his libel suit against the Daily Telegraph, and has collected a healthy £150,000 in damages. Tapped’s Mark Leon Goldberg provides the background, including some fascinating links that I missed at the time the story was developing.

At Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies points out one major downside to Galloway’s victory:

If the Telegraph had won this case, we would have the public interest defence for newspapers established, and the British press would have been that much freer from our ludicrous libel laws. So it’s a bit of a bummer all round.

I’m not a big Galloway fan, but have always thought this story stinks.
I can’t say it any better than John Quiggan’s comment in Davies’ post:

…I always found the supposed provenance of the Telegraph’s documents totally unbelievable.

A British journalist turns up as an Iraqi government building is being looted, trashed, burned etc and out of the thousands of documents floating about in the rubble happens on the one that implicates one of his newspaper’s favorite targets. How likely is that?