A cabinet minister who falsely suggested an academic supported Hamas has apologised for posting the claims on social media.
Science Secretary Michelle Donelan said she should have raised concerns about Professor Kate Sang privately.
Prof Sang was awarded £15,000 of taxpayers’ money in damages following the post on X (formerly Twitter).
Ms Donelan has faced demands from the opposition to pay the bill for legal costs and damages herself.
Labour’s shadow science secretary Peter Kyle said she had “now admitted that there was no need to publicly hurl abuse at an academic without evidence”.
“It’s an insult to hardworking families up and down the country that £15,000 of taxpayer money was wasted on unprofessional and libellous behaviour from a Conservative cabinet minister,” he said.
“Michelle Donelan has not been able to show that she still has the support of our vital scientific community.”
He said Ms Donelan still needed to answer whether civil servants had “helped to produce a dossier” on Prof Sang – and called on the minister to reveal the “overall legal fees paid by the taxpayer”.
Prof Sang, an academic at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, launched a libel action against Ms Donelan after the minister tweeted a letter she had written last October to UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) – a public body which manages the government’s research funding.
In the letter, Ms Donelan accused the professor of sharing “extremist views” and expressing sympathy for Hamas following the 7 October attacks in Israel.
Hamas is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK government and others.
Ms Donelan’s letter followed a tweet by Prof Sang which said: “This is disturbing” alongside a link to a Guardian article on the response to the Hamas attacks in the UK.
The science secretary has since accepted that Prof Sang’s comments referred to the Guardian story as a whole, and not just the headline – which focused on the government’s crackdown on support for Hamas.
Ms Donelan has also since admitted she had been wrong and had “misunderstood” the social media posts. She added that she had deleted her original post and fully accepted Prof Sang was “not an extremist, a supporter of Hamas or other proscribed organisation”.
Prof Sang was investigated – and subsequently cleared – by UKRI following Ms Donelan’s original claims.
The academic said she had been “very disturbed by the way in which Michelle Donelan and UKRI behaved”.
Earlier on Tuesday, Ms Donelan told a House of Lords committee she regretted posting her letter to UKRI on social media.
“While I always err on the side of transparency, I am now clear that in this case I could have sent the letter in confidence to the UKRI in order for them to undertake the investigations privately,” she told the science and technology committee.
“And I do apologise for not having done so, and for any distraction that this decision has caused from this government’s positive agenda.”
She told the committee she had always been a champion of academic freedom of speech but the incident “has to be viewed in the context of what was happening at the time…. given the fact we had just seen the attack on the shores of Israel”.
“And we had seen a great deal of hatred across online social media platforms, something I had addressed directly with the platforms themselves.
“And we were very worried about potential violence on our own streets.”
She had called for an investigation into Prof Sang because the academic had just been appointed to the organisation’s newly-formed equality, diversity and inclusion expert advisory group, she told the committee.
“My actions were never motivated by any political desire. They were motivated by a concern around whether proper process and due diligence had been followed.”
She insisted to the committee that academics were not under government surveillance, adding: “That would be outrageous.”
Officials had alerted her to Prof Sang’s tweet, and the decision to share her letter to UKRI on social media had been “cleared” by the relevant civil servants. she added.
Asked how the damage caused by the incident can be repaired, Ms Donelan said there would be an “internal review of processes to ensure that we learnt the lessons of this” and mistakes were not repeated.
