Politicians wade into privacy injunction debate

Just as the media frenzy surrounding Andrew Marr's confession that he took out a superinjunction to supress news of an extramarital affair died down, another storm erupted over a premiership footballer's injunction to supress reports of his alleged extramarital affair with a reality TV star. The man at the centre of the scandal became widely known to be Ryan Giggs after he was outed on Twitter. A High Court injunction banning journalists from revealing the footballer's name remained in place despite three attempts to have it lifted, with the latest attempt brought just hours after Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming used parliamentary privilege to reveal the footballer's identity in the House of Commons.

Mr Justice Tugendhat ruled that Hemming's comments served to "increase not decrease" the footballer's case for protection and that the injunction was not about secrecy but intrusion. He said: "It is obvious that if the purpose [of the injunction] was to protect a secret then it would have now failed - but as it is to do with harassment, it has not failed."

In a statement reported in the Guardian, Hemming said that he named Giggs because the player's lawyers were taking action against Twitter to reveal the personal details of users who'd revealed his identity. "When he sued Twitter, it was clear what he was doing. He was going after the ordinary people… So on one side you have a footballer upset that people are gossiping about him and on the other side you have ordinary people facing the threat of a two-year jail sentence."

According to the Telegraph, David Cameron commented that a situation where newspapers are banned from printing something that "clearly everyone else is talking about" is "unsustainable", and that there is danger that judges are writing new law - a job that should be reserved for the government. He said that Parliament would need to take time out to properly address the issue, but that he was "not sure there is going to be a simple answer".