Abortion Libel Claim By Cardinal's Former Aide

The former spokesman for the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales was "robbed of his moral authority" by a newspaper article which accused him of hypocrisy over abortion, the high court heard yesterday.

Austen Ivereigh, 41, says that he lost his £46,000-a-year job as head of public affairs for Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor because of the June 2006 article in the Daily Mail.

His QC, Ronald Thwaites, told Mr Justice Eady and a jury at the high court in London that the article robbed Ivereigh, a Catholic, of all moral authority, destroyed his credibility and ruined his reputation.

"It falsely alleged that he was a hypocrite for not practicing what he preached in relation to the issue of abortion," Thwaites said. Catholics would also have read into it that he was guilty of procuring an abortion and was therefore someone who should be excommunicated. "For this man few things could be more serious or devastating than that," said Thwaites.

The article claimed that an ex-lover of Ivereigh's had accused him of hypocrisy over an abortion she had in 1989. It alleged that he had given her "no choice but to have a termination". Ivereigh told the court that the abortion had taken place against his will after he had got his then-girlfriend pregnant when they were both students at Oxford in 1989. Although brought up as a Catholic, he was not a practicing Christian at the time, he said. He added that neither he, his mother nor his girlfriend wanted the pregnancy terminated, but her mother had overruled them. After the abortion he had paid half the costs of the operation to placate her mother, he said. The relationship ended soon afterwards.

Thwaites told the court the tale had been "distorted out of all recognition and combined with some recent events which provided the journalist with a peg on which to hang this sad old story".

While working for Murphy-O'Connor, Ivereigh began a relationship with a divorced mother of two. When she became pregnant with twins in early 2006 Ivereigh told the court the couple agreed to have the babies and get married. But after relations between them deteriorated and he felt that they should not get married, she said she had been contemplating an abortion, which, he said, left him "completely gutted and devastated".

A few hours later he asked her to marry him and she accepted. When he accompanied her to a scan he was overwhelmed and excited to see the two beating hearts of the non-identical twins. Later the relationship deteriorated again and he offered her some space to think. When she said she had no choice but to have an abortion he was "gutted" and "just couldn't believe it", he told the court. In the event, X suffered a miscarriage and lost both twins.

Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail, denies libel and claims the story is true. The hearing continues.