Superinjunction debate goes beyond sex lives of celebs

The debate over superinjunctions is far more important than the sex lives of over-exposed celebrities, writes Dan Wainwright.

Newspapers are crying foul. The rules that have been hurriedly drawn up by judges to protect the privacy of people with oodles of cash mean they cannot splash around the dirty details of footballers and surgically enhanced Big Brother contestants, of TV stars and prostitutes or the alledged kinky peccadilloes of people we vaguely recognise.

But the rules don’t seem to apply to the social networking site Twitter which newspaper editors think is terribly unfair on them.

Someone completely anonymous has used Twitter to reveal what might or might not be the names of the people involved. That person also named Jemima Khan, who is definitely not involved, but now the story is about her because she’s talking about a superinjunction she hasn’t got.

So we can name her because the story is nothing to do with her. We can also name about six billion other people in the world and for the record I would like to confirm that I also have never been photographed with Jeremy Clarkson.

I hate it when newspapers and journalists become the story. I’m firmly of the opinion that it’s not us you’re interested in but the things we tell you.

Whenever the BBC reports on the effects of its own journalists going on strike or on all the cuts it has to make it seems tragically self indulgent – like when Mr Bean sent himself a birthday card.

But there’s something more important underneath all this than moaning about not being able to report rather pointless gossip about people whose names we can’t tell you doing things with/to other people whose names we can tell you because they don’t have as much money as the other person whose name we can’t tell you.

And this is what it is: Judges don’t make the law. That’s what Parliament does.

Judges take those statutes and apply them in court and use the precedent from other, similar cases to make sure everyone has been treated the same.

The superinjunction is a precedent too far. At some point someone with very expensive lawyers convinced a judge to ban the old media from not only reporting the identity of the person who has got the injunction but also the existence of the junction. That’s what Andrew Marr used to gag his fellow journalists from reporting an affair he’d had, until he got an attack of guilt and came clean.

This is not the type of injunction the footballer who spent seven months in a fling with Big Brother’s Imogen Thomas secured hence the fact she can be named, the fact of the affair can be reported but the footballer cannot be identified.

But it’s all been lumped in with the overall debate on superinjunctions, which first came to prominence in 2009 when oil company Trafigura managed to gag the press from revealing details of the dumping of toxic waste on the Ivory Coast.

And here’s the rub. This is the difference between the public interest and what is merely interesting to the public.

We don’t need to know who Imogen Thomas has been sleeping with. Nor is it really of much interest that Andrew Marr could not keep it in his trousers, although I’m sure a few politicians will feel a little more relaxed when facing him in a hard hitting interview next time.

The problem is if these injunctions continue to evolve without the rules for their use being properly debated and put on the statute book. The rules must apply to Twitter the same as they apply to newspapers and broadcasters or they are worthless.

And judges must have something concrete from Parliament to work with before someone comes along and convinces them to gag details of something that has an effect on our everyday lives, something huge and monumental...that I just can’t tell you about.