Dimmock V Secretary of State For Education and Skills - Costs and Funding

Costs and Funding

Dimmock's legal costs were said to be around £200,000. He was awarded only two-thirds of his costs and is reported to have received a bill of more than £60,000 for the remainder.

The question of the lawsuit's funding was raised in September 2007, even before the case had concluded, by a report in The Daily Telegraph which wondered "Where will the money come from?". According to Stewart Dimmock's solicitor, it was "a private matter for him". However, the Telegraph noted that Dimmock was a member of the New Party, a small right-wing party with a record of climate change scepticism. The party declares that "political opportunism and alarmism have combined in seizing conclusions to push forward an agenda of taxation and controls that may ultimately be ineffective in tackling climate change, but will certainly be damaging to our economy and society". The New Party was reported to be backing Dimmock. It issued a press release on 1 October 2007 in which it publicised the case and declared, somewhat prematurely, that "it is becoming increasingly unlikely that the film will ever be shown as intended." In March 2008, the New Party's manifesto-writer Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley acknowledged he had prompted an unnamed wealthy friend to fund the case and that he had himself been heavily involved in the litigation. The Observer reported at the time that Dimmock's backers were "a powerful network of business interests with close links to the fuel and mining lobbies." The chairman of the New Party, Robert Durward, has been described as "a long-time critic of environmentalists" who established a climate change sceptic group called the Scientific Alliance. The alliance publicised Dimmock's case on its website and was also involved in advising Channel 4 on the controversial documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which Viscount Monckton is distributing to schools as a riposte to An Inconvenient Truth.