MR JUSTICE WARBY Approved Judgment Monroe v Hopkins [2017] EWHC 433 (QB) the relevant times. But I accept that the fast-moving nature of Twitter means that these figures can be relied on as giving a broadly accurate picture of how things stood at the times of publication. The claimant 7. Ms Monroe is 28 years old. She comes from a family with military connections. Her father was in the British Army for 7 years, being decorated for active service in the Falklands. He spent the next 30 years in the Fire Service. One of her three brothers is a Flying Officer in the RAF. She herself applied to join the RAF at the same time as her brother but was not accepted. She joined the Fire Service, serving for some 4 years between 2007 and 2011. She left the service due to the difficulties of combining it with motherhood, and spent 18 months on benefits. In 2012 she began blogging, on political topics. She is on the left. In due course she became a food blogger and cooking journalist, gaining a cookbook deal in around May 2013 and joining The Guardian in October 2013 writing recipe and cookery columns as well as more general political commentary. She has played a role in mainstream politics, speaking at Parliament on the debate about food banks, contributing to a report by Frank Field MP and speaking at Party Conferences. 8. Ms Monroe joined Twitter when in the Fire Service. From early 2012 her Twitter handle was @MsJackMonroe. Although she has changed it since, that was her handle at the times relevant to this case, when she had around 70 - 75,000 followers. At that time, she was on Twitter “every spare waking moment” as she puts it. She accepts the defendant’s estimate that she had tweeted around 20,000 times. She also accepts the defendant’s pleaded characterisation of her as “an outspoken political activist” who “has been highly critical of the Conservative Party and its policies – particularly its pursuit of austerity measures – whilst in Government”. She is, I find, often forthright in the way she expresses herself, and has quite often used profanities and other strong language, on Twitter. This is a description that those who know her from Twitter would recognise – though they might use different words. The defendant 9. Ms Hopkins’ Twitter handle is @KTHopkins. Her current Twitter profile describes her as a “Columnist @MailOnline, LBC Radio Host, CBB Runner Up…” In May 2015 her profile identified her as a columnist for The Sun. For the purposes of this case she describes herself as “confrontational, outspoken, forthright, often outrageous and frequently flippant in her journalism and social media activity, and very well known as such.” With the exception of the words “frequently flippant” this description was accepted by Ms Monroe under cross-examination. On the basis of the evidence in this case I would agree with it. I would agree that Ms Hopkins is sometimes flippant. Ms Hopkins has sometimes been described in the print media as “rentagob”, but this is not a term that Ms Monroe had heard used about her. She said “I tend to move in circles of cookery and politics rather than outrage and vitriol”. The evidence shows that Ms Hopkins is often acerbic, and known to be so. Mr Price has not pressed the point he put to the claimant, that “rentagob” is how everyone sees Ms Hopkins. The general picture is not, however, significantly controversial. Nor is it controversial that her politics are of the right.