“Man of the people” fleeces his sheep followers to buy a £1 million quid house then puts his foot in his gob and gets rinsed by a crowd funded refugee’s lawyer.This is simply not true in law.
His prompt retraction and take-down may make a case less likely, or damages lower if the case is pursued, but you're absolutely wrong if you look at the defences against libel set out in the law. If you look at the explanatory notes to the 2003 Defamation Act: "There is a long-standing common law rule that it is no defence to an action for defamation for the defendant to prove that he or she was only repeating what someone else had said (known as the “repetition rule”)".
Or some advice from a law firm: "Can you defame someone accidentally? Yes. A defendant's intention is generally irrelevant. The real issue is what the average reader would have understood the words to mean and whether they would cause reputational harm. You can accidentally defame someone by being careless in what you say. You may also be liable for simply repeating someone else's defamatory statement (e.g. by re-tweeting a defamatory statement) if your republication causes the claimant harm."
Most of the time it's just not worth it for people to take action, given the cost of bringing one (no legal aid for it), which is why this stuff happens all the time on Twitter when any of us might fall into the same trap, and people aren't sued. But this isn't the run of the mill case - Robinson is a high profile figure with zillions of followers unlike you or I, so the defamatory statement has far more reach and is far more damaging than if you or I posted it. Given his recent 950k home purchase he's also got assets that are worth going after. So whether this one will go the distance I don't know, but they could if they wished to - hence his hasty retraction, and in the wrong circumstances anyone else could find themselves in the same position.
Sweet, sweet justice.