Filling in the Blanks

As part of a sensational expose on British racketeering, London's tabloid Sunday Mirror last month thundered on its front page that Scotland Yard was investigating a homosexual relationship between a peer of the realm and a notorious London gangster. The Sunday Mirror and its weekday sister, the Daily Mirror, which repeated the story, named no names, describing the peer only as "a household word." But upon returning from a vacation, Lord Boothby, 64, onetime parliamentary private secretary to Winston Churchill, looked into the Mirrors and in effect screamed: That's me they're talking about!

Lord Boothby, who is divorced from a cousin of former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's wife, immediately wrote a letter to the Times of London denying that he was a homosexual. He sent copies of the letter to the two Mirrors, challenging them to print whatever "shred of evidence" they had against him and "to take the consequences."

Press Lord Cecil King, who publishes the Daily and Sunday Mirrors, which are two of Britain's largest mass-circulation papers, wasted little time deciding that those consequences might be altogether too unpleasant. To avoid any legal action by Lord Boothby, King admitted that his papers had erred, apologized and paid the peer $112,000 in damages. Lord Boothby thus won the distinction of becoming the first man in memory who ever named himself as the subject of a damaging printed report and then collected damages.

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