In practice, a person also needs to prove he or she has a reputation capable of being harmed. A mass murderer cannot sue if he has been accused of petty theft – innocent or not.
Pure abuse is not defamatory per se. Nor can the dead sue, so basically you can say anything you like about a person as soon as his body is cold.
A classic example of this came in the wake of the mysterious death by drowning near Tenerife of Robert Maxwell in November 1991. The millionaire publisher was a frequent user/abuser of the court system, threatening legal action and economic ruination on anyone who meddled in his business affairs.
His death prompted tributes from greats across the globe, and sent journalists delving deeper and with less fear. It was soon revealed he was a master thief and among his many victims were the pensioners of one of his companies, Mirror Group Newspapers. A £400 million hole was discovered in the pension fund – money which had been used illegally to finance operations elsewhere in his empire.

How some stories get into the Press is beyond me. I mean who told The Daily Mirror that actress Daryl Hannah had skipped rehearsals so she could attend her dog’s birthday? Valuable court time was thank- fully shortened when the Mirror coughed up undisclosed damages.

I was a newcomer on The Daily Star at the time of the original Archer case in 1986-87. Whenever the editor, Lloyd Turner, appeared in the production rooms, compositors would commence whistling the theme tune to The Archers (a BBC Radio soap). Turner took it without flinching. Yet when Turner died following a heart attack in 1996, his widow said: “I shall always wonder whether the stress of the libel case precipitated his premature death.”