The price of privacy

Well well well, CTB the superinjuncted footballer is Ryan Giggs. Who knew?! Only most parliamentarians and about 75,000 people on Twitter, which as one of the newspapers is bound to have mentioned, is about the same as an average crowd at Old Trafford. I found out from the Mail on Sunday. At this point I should make plain that I will never buy this rag while it employs Piers Morgan, any more than I would buy The Sun since its coverage of the Hillsborough disaster. But in the airport lounge a couple of Sundays ago I happened to read a bizarre interview with moderately-famous actor Hugh Bonneville in the Independent and, only a few minutes later, the MoS article linked above.

The purpose of the story is absolutely clear in the context of the recent rash of superinjunctions, one of them taken out by an actor to cover an alleged affair with "Wayne Rooney's prostitute" Helen Wood. But the phrase that caught my attention was in the last paragraph: "Hugh’s devotion to wife Lulu is so strong it is understood he is known to fellow thespians as the Ryan Giggs of the showbusiness world, after the famously family-orientated footballer." Journalistic genius. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.

The thing is, "famous footballer plays away with Big Brother contestant" definitely falls into the category of dog bites man. "Famous footballer turns down meaningless sex offered by Big Brother contestant" would be man bites dog. David Beckham seems to have suffered no long-term damage despite allegations of an affair - and he plays the family man card far more often than Ryan Giggs, who for all I knew could have been free and single like the rampant heterosexual Ashley Cole.

Don't get me wrong, I don't condone what Giggs (allegedly) did. I'm old-fashioned enough to think that wedding vows mean something and being faithful is a choice. But equally I'm not sure whether it's anyone else's business what the Premiership's longest-serving player got up to with a pneumatic Welshwoman of questionable repute. Leave him in peace to sort it out with his wife. Nor does it matter to me if Mr Bonneville paid to be violated with an object. There's no "public interest" defence here that I can see, if interest is taken to mean "benefit" rather than "curiosity". The right to privacy ought to be prioritised yet appears to have vanished in the Hello! celebrity culture. But Giggs's attempts to pursue tweeters for naming him is ludicrous. Social networking sites and the new media are clearly well ahead of both the mainstream media for disseminating information whether true or false and of the law in judging what is reasonable. Writs are a blunt instrument in a war against instantaneous and universal transmission of thought. The lawyers are probably laughing now, until the celebrities realise they're wasting their time. The PR people however will continue to rake it in trying to repair the damage. It would be an interesting development if Imogen Thomas sued him for slander over his allegation that she was trying to blackmail him.

According to an article I read recently there are several dozen superinjunctions out there, held by various Premiership footballers, actors and other celebrities. Walls have ears even when they're part of a courtroom and sooner or later the names will leak out. Now, if you'll excuse me, although these stories don't interest me I must go and look up Ewan McGregor + superinjunction on Google...