Joey Barton defends his online spat with Jeremy Vine as like 'boxers trying to sell a product' - after TV presenter brands ex-pro's tweets 'a cloud of filth'

Joey Barton claimed on Wednesday that he posted tweets linking Jeremy Vine with convicted paedophiles to build up a boxing-style rivalry between them which would benefit the TV presenter.

After a visibly emotional Mr Vine described how the tweets were a ‘cloud of filth’ which left him fearing for his young daughters’ safety, Barton insisted that they were all ‘a joke with dark humour’ and part of a running ‘tiff’ which the TV host had been contributing to.

Barton said: ‘He’s got a daytime TV show and he’s trying to get me on. It’s like two boxers trying to sell a product. It’s him noising me up and me noising him up. We are trading. We are in a showdown for further down the line.’

He claimed that the tweets in which he linked Mr Vine to sex offenders Rolf Harris and Jeffrey Epstein started because Mr Vine had ‘gaslighted’ him over his decision to appear on Piers Morgan's show and not the presenter’s own Channel 5 programme.

He said: ‘Maybe it was because I chose Piers Morgan over him. In the journalistic world, if you get the scoop, you get the advantage. Jeremy is slightly disappointed.’

Barton, who revealed that he had been forced to pay out £600,000 after Vine sued him for libel over the paedophile posts, presented himself as a family man ‘brought up by matriarchs’ who would not aim to distress recipients of tweets.

He denied that a tweet superimposing images of pundits Lucy Ward and Eni Aluko on a picture of serial killers Fred and Rose West was offensive. ‘I wasn’t trying to say they were serial killers or murderers. It was a joke about them murdering football coverage,’ he said.

That tweet led Mr Vine to send a post question where Barton might have some kind of ‘brain injury’ which removed his inhibitions. Barton subsequently called Mr Vine a ‘bike nonce’ on multiple occasions, published his address and asked for incriminating ‘dirt’ on him, from his three million Twitter followers.

The former Manchester City player denied that his repeated use of ‘bike nonce’ was a suggestion that Mr Vine was a paedophile. He said it was a term for someone who ‘loves their bike, has all the Lycra, helmet, top of the range gear.’ Devotees of golf were also known as ‘golf nonces’, he claimed.

He took a tweet by Mr Vine about the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death to be a continuation of a duel involving paedophile jibes and, he said, responded accordingly.

Barton also tweeted suggesting that the police should be called if Mr Vine was found cycling near a primary school. But he claimed this was not a suggestion that the presenter had paedophile tendencies, but instead a reference to Mr Vine being caught on film cycling on a pavement outside a school where bikes were not permitted. ‘He posts videos of motorists misbehaving. This was me saying “technically you’re not perfect,” Barton claimed.

Barton claimed that Cheshire Police had first questioned him about his tweets in a way which he considered to be ‘intimidation’ after two officers arrived at his house on four days in a row before finally finding him.

‘My wife and family were in the house and the police were trying to intimidate me,’ Barton said. ‘I was out trying to set up a podcast studio.’

He said he regretted settling the libel case with Vine in a way which included him publicly apologizing for calling Mr Vine a paedophile. Barton said: ‘Originally it was £25,000 that Jeremy was going to give to charity. It was just a question of getting this settled. All this for a tiff online. 

'The option was to run this to trial and run to costs of two, three, four million and get into a financial mess. I would never have settled if I had known there was a criminal case coming.’

Barton denies 12 charges of sending a grossly offensive electronic communication with intent to cause distress or anxiety. The case continues.