Well, knock me down with a Ferrari, who’d have thought it? Jemima Khan and Jeremy Clarkson! The fragrant, pouting Mima — epitome of well-bred, bankrolled, metro liberal hand-wringing faux angst — getting it on with the dishevelled reactionary so far to the right-of-centre-he’s-almost-in-the-median-strip petrolhead Jeremy.
Well, knock me down with a Ferrari, who’d have thought it? Jemima Khan and Jeremy Clarkson! The fragrant, pouting Mima — epitome of well-bred, bankrolled, metro liberal hand-wringing faux angst — getting it on with the dishevelled reactionary so far to the right-of-centre-he’s-almost-in-the-median-strip petrolhead Jeremy. It’s like finding out that Harriet Harman has been secretly knocking off Jim Davidson behind our backs. Or Shami Chakrabati and Hitler. Well, OK, I overstate the case with that last one. And it is true that Jezza (Repton School), is not quite as distant, socially, from Jemima as are many of the rest of us, although it is a marginal thing. I mean, he still comes from Doncaster. I very much doubt that Jemima visits Doncaster too often. It’s even worse than Islamabad, and she got out of there pretty sharpish.
Of course, the reason we know about the affair between Jemima and Jeremy is that it didn’t happen. We are in the spooky, paradoxical universe of slebdom and super-injunctions. If Jemima and Jeremy really had been involved in an affair, we wouldn’t know about it. But because they definitely have not had an affair, we do — just as we now know that the affable jug-eared BBC journalist Andrew Marr isn’t the father of a child with some woman he’d had an affair with years ago. If he had been the father, my guess is we still wouldn’t know about it. Mr Justice Eady’s super-injunctions, then, are the gift that keeps on giving; in a sense, you are not a proper sleb without one. And the non-sleb population assume that everyone who is a sleb has demanded some sort of super-injunction about some noisome aspect of their private lives.
Ms Khan, née Goldsmith, who is described as a ‘political activist’, has found these horrible rumours of her own super-injunction ‘a nightmare’. Her many followers on Twitter, who seem to include the idiot blogger Guido Fawkes, have been treated to a litany of anguish and protestation. It is not true, she says, that she has taken out a super-injunction to prevent knowledge of an affair with Jezza being made public, via the publication of allegedly ‘intimate’ photographs of the two of them. There are no photographs, there has been no affair, there is no court order. And Jemima adds, perhaps unnecessarily, that she is a good friend of Clarkson’s wife, Frances, and that she had dinner with the two of them a couple of nights ago. The IQ of Twitter followers can be gauged by the fact that some are suggesting that the person who made the original allegation that Jemima had taken out a super-injunction would be in trouble with the courts for defying the super-injunction that she hadn’t taken out. But here’s an interesting hypothetical: if Jemima is not telling the truth and really had taken out a super-injunction, presumably she has now fallen foul of it herself. I must ask ol’ Eady for clarification on this matter.
They will rue the day Twitter (and the like) came along, the inhabitants of Slebsville. It may afford them the opportunity to engage, in a very real sense, with their adoring public, to tell them that they have just bought a packet of crisps or that they think David Cameron is quite ghastly — but there is always a large proportion of the public which is not terribly adoring and even predisposed to spite. If they think the tabloids are bad, the slebs, let them start dealing with the people who read them and see how they get on. It’s always been my suspicion that while Brits are evidently interested in slebs, they do not much like them, in general, and there are plenty who view them with undisguised loathing.
Meanwhile, these super-injunctions are beginning to serve precisely the opposite purpose to the one presumably intended by the people who apply for them. They stoke up not merely intense and perverse interest about who it is and what terrible things they might have to hide — even among those who would not normally give a monkey’s — but also a resentment that freedom of speech is being constrained by unelected judges, even among those who have no time, usually, for press intrusion into private lives.
Three minutes’ tapping away on Google will reveal to you the names of the actors, the footballer and the slebchef who have taken out these super-injunctions, even if you might not already have inferred them from the sly, nudge-nudge techniques of some of the newspapers. In other words, the stories are already in the public domain and I am not aware of any attempt to prosecute the miscreants of blogsville for having put them there, so far. It is now libellous to suggest that someone might have taken out a super-injunction; if, however, they have taken out a super-injunction but deny having done so and then sue anyone who suggests that they have, how will the courts react? In defence of the person telling the truth, or to uphold the edict of the court? Or, in this spooky parallel universe I mentioned, both simultaneously? Probably the latter, as it will mean more money for the lawyers in the end.
And the question then becomes: what do Eady and his ilk do about the vast outpouring of information, disinformation and lies which comes not from the pussy-whipped and legally constrained mainstream press, but from the rest of the world? Try suing American-owned companies like Facebook and Twitter and see how far you get.
Comments