How Jeremy Vine took down smirking bully Joey Barton - IAN HERBERT takes you inside the 'snarling' court showdown that exposed football's most detestable man for who he really is

A self-satisfied smirk played across Joey Barton’s face in the dock at Liverpool Crown Court dock this week, when Jeremy Vine said, in the course of describing the ex-footballer and his X followers branding him a paedophile, that he ‘didn’t want to get into any combat with him’.

You imagined that Barton’s self-satisfaction in that moment was borne of his sense that Vine had declined the virtual version of a physical fight with him. Barton’s language during several extraordinary hours of rambling, excruciating testimony on Thursday included a description of himself ‘going in hard’ on X. Unemployable in football, he is trying to take his football style and reputation into the only public space left to him.

But Barton, the common bully, finally met his match in Vine, an individual who, though terrified to find millions of people being asked for personal ‘dirt’ on him, including details of how his first marriage ended, took the ex-footballer on and brought him down. Barton was found guilty today on six counts of sending 'grossly offensive' electronic communications to Vine and football pundits Lucy Ward and Eni Aluko. 

Barton was gunning for Vine once more when the case, which saw the ex-player accused of deliberately causing anxiety and distress with his tweets, came to trial at Liverpool Crown Court. 

After Vine had testified powerfully and emotionally on Wednesday, his voice breaking as he described the ‘cloud of filth’ which left him fearing for his two young daughters, Barton thought a fightback would come through his barrister Simon Csoka KC’s cross-examination of the TV and radio presenter.

His hope was to prove that Vine’s comments about himself in the past, taken with his confrontational approach to motorists as a cycling campaigner, demonstrated that the 60-year-old was a provocateur. The evidence of that is thin. 

In 2007, Vine did question whether it was appropriate that Barton, a Manchester City player with a history of violent conduct, should be selected to play for Steve McClaren’s England. His violence was big news that year. He had been cleared of assaulting a taxi driver but convicted of assaulting team-mate Ousmane Dabo and, months later, a member of the public in Liverpool city centre.

But when this line of cross-examination was opened up in Court 3.1, Vine proved himself far more than a witness to the social media abuse which had seen him take professional security advice and change his daily movements.

‘I need to know what I can say in relation to these old tweets because I don’t want to say something I should not,’ Vine told the judge Andrew Menary, indicating that he was quite prepared to make disclosures which would acquaint the jury with a damning perspective on Barton extending far beyond this case.

When the jury had been asked to leave the court, Vine made it clear that if Barton’s legal team wanted to go back to historic comments, then he was entitled to provide the unflattering context, including the Liverpool assault which saw him jailed for six months in 2008.

‘I would need to provide the context,’ Vine told the judge. ‘I think he had been selected for England and then it became an issue of whether we are heading for a violent moment on the pitch. 

'Mr Barton has had a really serious history of violent offending, and these tweets are nothing compared to what he has done. Knocking out the teeth of a child in Liverpool city centre and leaving a man unconscious. He has faced many FA charges for violent misconduct.’

Trying, and not always succeeding, to maintain a patina of courtroom respect by calling the defendant ‘Mr Barton’, Vine told the judge that the persona of a working-class intellectual which the defendant wanted to convey to the jury was nonsense.

‘Barton launched himself as a philosopher, claimed he read Nietzsche and appeared on Newsnight,’ Vine said. ‘But many people were saying, “This guy is a violent criminal, what’s he doing on this programme?". And that group turned out to be right.’

There was a very definite barb from Vine about Barton’s limited England career – one late substitute appearance early in 2007. ‘He possibly played for England that year for 10 minutes or whatever,’ Vine said, as Barton listened in the dock. 

'But we should not look away from the FA charges. How he stuck a cigar in someone’s eyes (Manchester City youth player Jamie Tandy) and punched someone while they were on the ground (Dabo).’

The judge concluded that Vine had been right to raise concerns about where the line of cross-examination might lead and it subsequently took a different course.

Vine’s series of viral clips about supposedly errant and dangerous motorists was pursued by Barton’s legal team, including the broadcaster’s use of the word ‘petro-sexual’ as a pejorative term. Vine told the court they had been popular for a while but had become divisive and created a negativity which had persuaded him to drop them.

Barton’s only remaining opportunity to counter Vine came during his own time in the witness box – a rambling performance the likes of which Liverpool Crown Court has not seen before.

His claim that his paedophile insinuations about Vine were a performative way of building up a lucrative boxing-type rivalry between the two of them was utterly unconvincing. He was left to take random catty swipes at Vine - accusing him of having ‘Main Character Syndrome’ and of having ‘snarled’ at him when they passed each other in court on Wednesday.

In the witness box, Barton - who will now be sentenced on December 8 - paraded a swagger and self-importance about being a name in the football bubble. He said that continuing to fight the libel case Vine brought against him would have meant spending ‘mega dough’ of ‘four or five million’ as celebrities Johnny Depp and Rebekah Vardy had done. 

But he said he would have proceeded with that fight, had he known the Liverpool case - ‘a criminal’ as he called it, with the vocabulary of a man well acquainted with the dock – was coming down the track.

Vine’s testimony took proceedings out of the narrow world of Barton the fighter and footballer into a land of calm, measured, fundamental common sense. ‘What would cause a right-minded individual to tweet such disgusting things?’ he asked.