Similar claims by the reinstated officers against other news media had been settled on payment of agreed damages amounting to £40,000.

Both were rejected by McAlpine, leading to Joshua Rozenberg, a lawyer and columnist for London's The Guardian newspaper, to opine "that the undisclosed, agreed damages were higher than she had hoped."

The former Tory party deputy chairman, Lord Aldington, has accepted £30,000 agreed damages and a public apology over war crimes allegations from the publishers of the historian Nikolai Tolstoy's book, The Minister and the Massacres.

A YOUNG Coldstream Guardsman confined to a wheelchair by catastrophic injuries when an army vehicle driven by a comrade overturned in Cyprus, was awarded £1 million agreed damages against the Ministry of Defence at the High Court in London yesterday.