In an English High Court decision, a former MP has lost his claim
to the copyright in the 1997 autobiography of the late John
Cairncross, believed to be the fifth member of the Cambridge spy
ring recruited by the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Rupert Allason, former Tory MP for Torbay, sued the publisher
Random House, claiming that the copyright in the autobiography
belonged to him and that Random House should split the profits with
him. Allason argued that he ghost-wrote the book for John
Cairncross, and/or that Cairncross wrote the book and had orally
assigned the British rights in the book to him to evade the
publishing restrictions placed on former Foreign Office
employees.
The court noted that Allason’s two arguments were inconsistent
with each other: “In one John Cairncross was not an author, while
in the second he was.” Pointing to evidence from Random House of
manuscripts and material written by Cairncross himself, the court
decided that the ghost writing argument “was quite hopeless.”
During the proceedings, Allason said in evidence that he was not
a director of St. Ermin’s Press, another publishing company which
had entered into negotiations with Cairncross for rights to the
book. He described himself as a consultant. However, when the judge
in the case, Mr Justice Laddie, checked its web site when arguments
in the case had finished, but before making his decision, he found
Allason named as “editorial director”. By the following day, the
description on the site had been changed to read “editorial
consultant.” Mr Justice Laddie called Allason, who has brought 17
libel actions in his lifetime, “one of the most dishonest witnesses
I have ever seen” and passed the case details to the Director of
Public Prosecutions.
The court also rejected Allason’s argument that the copyright in
the work had been orally assigned to him, believing it to be
“wholly untrue” and invented by Allason “when he realised that his
claim to be sole author had no prospect of being believed.”
