MR JUSTICE WARBY Approved Judgment Monroe v Hopkins [2017] EWHC 433 (QB) all agreed, though it remains to consider whether everybody who read the Second Tweet was aware of them. 28. The argument for Ms Hopkins is that the Second Tweet did not bear the meaning complained of. It “would have been understood [by] the ordinary reader as no more than a petulant acknowledgment by [her] that she had mistakenly identified [Ms Monroe] instead of Ms Penny”. Alternatively, it is argued that the Second Tweet bore the same meaning as the First Tweet: that Ms Monroe “was supportive – politically – of those who had painted the slogan onto the monument.”. The law 29. In Jeynes at [14] Sir Anthony Clarke MR gave this frequently cited summary of the principles to be applied when deciding meaning: “(1) The governing principle is reasonableness. (2) The hypothetical reasonable reader is not naïve but he is not unduly suspicious. He can read between the lines. He can read in an implication more readily than a lawyer and may indulge in a certain amount of loose thinking but he must be treated as being a man who is not avid for scandal and someone who does not, and should not, select one bad meaning where other nondefamatory meanings are available. (3) Over-elaborate analysis is best avoided. (4) The intention of the publisher is irrelevant. (5) The article must be read as a whole, and any “bane and antidote” taken together. (6) The hypothetical reader is taken to be representative of those who would read the publication in question. (7) In delimiting the range of permissible defamatory meanings, the court should rule out any meaning which, “can only emerge as the produce of some strained, or forced, or utterly unreasonable interpretation … (8) It follows that “it is not enough to say that by some person or another the words might be understood in a defamatory sense.”...” 30. Principle (2) sets out a neutral approach. It would obviously be wrong for the court, in the position of the reasonable reader, to select the most defamatory meaning available: Simpson v MGN Ltd [2016] EWCA Civ 772 [2016] EMLR 26 [15] (Laws LJ). Equally, the final words of this principle do not indicate that the reasonable reader would, or that the court should, lean in the opposite direction. As Tugendhat J pointed out in McAlpine [66] the words about not “selecting one bad meaning” are: “… part of the description of the hypothetical reasonable reader, rather than as a prescription of how such a reader should attribute meanings to words complained of as defamatory. If there are two possible meanings, one less derogatory than the other, whether it is the more or the less derogatory meaning that the court should adopt is to be determined by reference to what the hypothetical reasonable reader would understand in all the circumstances.”