In the dog days of August, it’s pretty rare for anything momentous to happen in the legal world, but that’s precisely what happened last week, courtesy of Mr. Justice Bean.

Section 1 of the Defamation Act 2013 reformulated the definition of “defamatory” by introducing the concept of ‘serious harm’. Out went the old test of “lowering a person in the estimation of right thinking members of society”, and in came the new test: a “statement is not defamatory unless its publication has caused, or is likely to cause, serious harm to the reputation of the claimant”.

The Act came into force at the beginning of this year, but until now, there has not been any case law on what the ‘serious harm’ test means in practice.

But last week’s judgment in Cook and Midland Heart Limited v MGN provides the first insight into the courts’ interpretation of what constitutes ‘serious harm’.

The claim arose from an article in the Sunday Mirror headlined “Millionaire Tory cashes in on TV Benefits Street”. The article was predominantly about James Turner Street (of Channel 4’s Benefit Street series). However, the article also mentioned the Claimants, Midland Heart (a housing association), and Ms Cook, who owns and runs Midland Heart.

The Mirror made an interim application to the Court to determine both the meaning of the article and whether the claimants had suffered “serious harm”. After making a determination about the meaning of the programme, Mr. Justice Bean made the ruling that really affects the rest of the press, that the claimants had not suffered serious harm (and so had no case).

In determining that the Claimants did not pass the ‘serious harm’ test, Mr Justice Bean gave significant weight to the apology that was printed by the Sunday Mirror the week after the original story was published, and the quick removal of the offending paragraph from the online version of the story.

The Judge said that for those who read the original article and the apology, the apology was enough to “eradicate or at least minimise any unfavourable impression created by the original article”. He added that the group of people who had only read the original article was likely to be small, and he also gave weight to the fact that the apology is now more prominently available online than the original article.

It can not be assumed that a prominent apology and swift removal will always prevent a complainant from meeting the ‘serious harm’ test or that the same principle will apply in cases where the article has a higher defamatory meaning than in this case. However, the weight given to the mitigating action taken by the Sunday Mirror is significant.

Equally significant is the finding by the Judge that the readership from one week to another is more or less static, so it can be assumed that those who read the article also read the following week’s apology. The significance of this aspect of the judgment will not be lost on weeklies up and down the country.

But before anyone gets too carried away, remember that nothing is ever black and white with the law. Whilst it is clear that ‘serious harm’ is a higher threshold than its predecessor test of ‘substantial harm’, there is still a good deal of ambiguity about how much higher the bar has now been set. Nevertheless, it is clear that the harm threshold has been increased under the new statutory test, and raised quite substantially.

Inevitably, this is not the last we have heard about what is, or is not, defamatory, but from the press’ perspective, this is a good start.

Never mind taking a Jeffrey Archer for your holiday beach reading – the judgment in Cooke is a much more riveting read!