Victoria Cross

• Aged forty-two, he was Britain's youngest Prime Minister in more than 200 years.
• He is a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party and currently honorary chairman of the International Democrat Union.
• Lord Ashcroft is an award-winning author who has written twenty-six other books, largely on politics and bravery.
• His political books include biographies of David Cameron, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Rishi Sunak, Sir Keir Starmer and Carrie Johnson.

• The court found that reporting by Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters and David Wroe had satisfactorily established the truth of several serious imputations against Roberts-Smith.
• Read more:
  A win for the press, a big loss for Ben Roberts-Smith: what does this judgment tell us about defamation law?

Standards of proof and evidence

• This case was a civil proceeding, meaning the imputations only needed to be proven true on the balance of probabilities, a substantially lower requirement than proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which would be required in a criminal trial.
• Because of the different standards of proof, it is not certain Roberts-Smith would be found guilty in a war crimes trial, assuming all the same evidence was called.
• Prosecutors will be concerned, moreover, that the outcome of the high-profile defamation trial might influence a future war crimes proceeding.

Contextual truth

• Some imputations against Roberts-Smith were not substantiated at the defamation trial.
• However, Justice Besanko found that these defamatory statements, which concerned threatening a fellow soldier and domestic violence, were nonetheless contextually true.

Broader implications

• He received financial support for the case from Kerry Stokes – who, from 2015 to 2022, was chair of the Australian War Memorial.
• While the memorial as an institution did not support Roberts-Smith with the case, Stokes remained as chair even after his role was publicly questioned.
• The interpretation from some quarters that reporting on Roberts-Smith constitutes unfair criticism of a war hero will persist.
• Since the second world war, Australia has positioned itself internationally as a champion of the laws and proper conduct of war.

• It has existed in various guises since the early twentieth century, but it was only formally constituted in July 1940.
• In this book, Michael Ashcroft tells the astonishing stories of some of its most courageous and ingenious figures, who have operated all over the world from the First World War to the present day.
• This book pays tribute to them and shows why, in the words of the 1st Duke of Marlborough, 'No war can be conducted successfully without early and good intelligence.'
• He is a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party and currently honorary chairman of the International Democrat Union.

• Falklands War Heroes tells the stories behind his collection of valour and service medals awarded for the Falklands War.
• The collection, almost certainly the largest of its kind in the world, spans all the major events of the war.
• This book, which contains nearly forty individual write-ups, has been written to mark the fortieth anniversary of the war.
• Lord Ashcroft is also a political biographer who has written books on David Cameron, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer.