LAST year, Jonathan Aitken's failed libel suit left the former Tory high flier's career and reputation in tatters. It was a far cry from another libel case in which Aitken's great uncle, Lord Beaverbrook, lost a libel action, paid the cost and moved effortlessly on.

Lord Beaverbrook - born William Maxwell Aitken - was the newspaper publisher behind the Daily Express (his father came from West Lothian). The newspaper became an enlargement of his personality and ego. A political fixer, he could not fix a famous libel trial between the Express and writer Evelyn Waugh.

Born in 1879 in Canada, Max Aitken was already a millionaire when he came to England in 1910. Despite being characterised by members of the establishment as a ''little Canadian adventurer'', he entered politics and became a propaganda expert, as Britain's first Minister for Information.

His biggest claim to fame was buying the Daily Express in 1919, when the paper was on its last legs, and transforming it into a top seller. Along the way, he made as many enemies as friends in high places.

Beaverbrook was also famed for his malicious grudges. He fell out with Noel Coward after Coward's 1942 war film In Which We Serve featured a scene showing a Daily Express front page, headlined ''No War This Year'', floating among the flotsam of a Royal Navy ship which had just been torpedoed by the Germans. Beaverbrook did not take kindly to this slight, especially in a film clearly based on the naval career of Lord Louis Mountbatten. Beaverbrook was vehemently hostile to Mountbatten, particularly after the disastrous 1942 raid on Dieppe in which several hundred Canadian soldiers were killed on a suicidal mission planned by Mountbatten.

Noel Coward called Max Beaverbrook ''one of the greatest vulgarians that have ever lived'', and the tycoon, in Coward's eyes, symbolised everything wrong with the spiteful British press. Express critics constantly rubbished Coward and his plays.

Then, the highly opinionated Beaverbrook fell out with the novelist Evelyn Waugh. Waugh had previously worked for the Express in 1927, and parodied Beaverbrook in no less than three of his books: Vile Bodies (1930), Scoop (1938) and Brideshead Revisited (1945).

According to Waugh biographer Selina Hastings, Lord Copper, the Daily Beast proprietor in Scoop, was ''inspired by Beaverbrook . . . Copper was rich, ruthless and omnipotent and, like Beaverbrook, ran an absolute dictatorship while maintaining the pretence that he never interfered with staff.'' In the mid-fifties, the Express, Sunday Express and London Evening Standard seemed to be running a vendetta of spiteful reviews of Waugh's books.

Prolific Express writer Nancy Spain was commissioned to interview Waugh and, one evening in 1955, turned up unannounced at his country house, ignoring the ''No admittance on business'' sign at the gate. It was rumoured that Spain had been drinking on an empty stomach, a popular pastime of working journalists. A furious altercation between Mr and Mrs Waugh and Miss Spain ensued, the journalist being told to go away in no uncertain terms.

Her hopes for an interview dashed, Spain had enough copy for her acidic column, which was seen by many as an attempt to punish Waugh. Bitter correspondence ensued in the pages of the Spectator. Neither party seemed willing to let the matter drop. When Spain interviewed Alec Waugh she wrote that he was ''a more interesting, talented man who had been overshadowed by his younger brother''.

In response, Evelyn Waugh wrote an article in the Spectator on the current state of literary criticism, stating that the Beaverbrook press had no influence on book sales. Spain responded in her book column that ''Alec Waugh's book Island in the Sun, foretold by me and this year's runaway bestseller, has now topped 60,000 copies as a direct result of my Daily Express notice''. Moreover, that the figure dwarfed ''the total first edition sales'' of all Evelyn Waugh's work.

Waugh saw his chance and sued. Rose Collis, Spain's biographer, takes up the story: ''His solicitors wrote to the Express demanding an apology, substantial damages, indemnity as to costs and an undertaking not to publish any future libels against him.

The Express lawyers replied that the article was not libellous. A suit was duly filed and Nancy retaliated by filing a counter-claim for damages, on the grounds that Waugh's article in the Spectator was defamatory of her.

In the case of Waugh v Beaverbrook Newspapers Ltd and Another, Waugh was represented by the celebrated QC Gerald Gardiner, while Beaverbrook retained Sir Hartley Shawcross, the former Labour Attorney General. Alec Waugh spoke in support of his brother.

According to Gardiner, Spain's article was ''written recklessly and in a flaming temper'', and vastly misrepresented the number of Evelyn Waugh's books in print.

In mitigation, Spain feebly claimed that when she encountered Waugh she hadn't eaten all day and was not in the best of moods, and admitted there were discrepancies between what had taken place and what she'd written. Waugh was never sure of winning and even suspected that the case would finally bankrupt him. ''I would have settled for #50,'' he wrote. ''At the end of the first day's hearing I would have taken a fiver.''

After nearly two hours, the jury delivered its verdict: in favour of Waugh, who was to be awarded #2000 damages.

''The verdict was not so much for me as against Beaverbrook,'' wrote Waugh. Spain's counter-claim was dismissed, and in a strange coda, Waugh took Beaverbrook to court again six weeks later when the Express's literary editor wrote in a book review: ''For years, Mr Evelyn Waugh has been implying the worthless and dissolute are more worthy than people who are in fact worthy and who keep sober.''

Having not learned its lesson, the Express, the paper's literary editor, and Spain made further comments about Waugh to which the writer took objection. In part, Beaverbrook's lawyers were blamed for not taking peremptory action. Waugh, on the warpath, sued and Beaverbrook conceded defeat paying a further #3000 plus costs in an out of court settlement. With the money, Waugh bought a beautiful manor house in Somerset.