Two weeks ago, the London Evening Standard outed me as one of four ‘celebrities’ who’d broken the super-injunction about Ryan Giggs. According to the newspaper: ‘Lawyers warned the stars could face a huge bill for damages after revealing the name of the Premier League footballer on microblogging site Twitter.’
My crime was to post the following tweet after the story broke that Giggs’s lawyers were going after the site’s American owners: ‘In other news, Ryan Giggs has decided to sue “the grapevine”. “We can’t have people gossiping over the garden fence,” said Schillings CEO.’ Rather a feeble joke and hardly worth going to jail for.
Luckily, nothing happened. The Standard’s story, which it ran on the front page, was prompted by a Commons statement from the Attorney-General the previous day. ‘Those who take an idea that modern methods of communication mean that they can act with impunity may well find themselves in for a rude shock,’ he said.
The Standard neglected to mention that Dominic Grieve also told the Commons that he had no intention of delivering this ‘rude shock’, since no referral had been made in relation to a contempt of court. The implication was that in the absence of the Hon. Mr Justice Eady referring an individual to him for breaking the super-injunction, he’d be unlikely to prosecute.
I thought I was out of the woods, but earlier this week the Attorney-General made another statement, this time on Radio 4’s Law In Action. ‘If you’re a tweeter and you’re susceptible to the jurisdiction of our national courts in England and Wales, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that you may find yourself being brought into court for contempt,’ he said. ‘I will take action if I think that my intervention is necessary in the public interest, to maintain the rule of law, proportionate and will achieve an end of upholding the rule of law.’
Does that mean he’d take action in the absence of a referral? My reading of his remarks is that he could but he won’t, at least not in the present case. Rather, he’s putting people like me on notice that we shouldn’t consider ourselves exempt from prosecution just because we happen to have broken a super-injunction on Twitter. In other words, ‘You’ll get away with it this time, sonny, but don’t do it again.’
He also said it would be more normal for action to be initiated by the person who’d taken out the injunction rather than the Attorney-General. So am I at risk of being sued by Ryan Giggs? That, too, seems unlikely, if only because it isn’t in Giggs’s interest to give this story any more legs than it already has. The point of taking out the super-injunction was to stop people writing about his extra-curricular activities. Coming after me would just give the press another excuse to write about him.
Believe it or not, I rather regret tweeting about the footballer. I believe passionately in freedom of speech and don’t think my rights as a freeborn Englishman should be circumscribed by the European Court of Human Rights, but risking prosecution over a bit of celebrity tittle-tattle seems pointless. I’d much rather be in exactly the same predicament for breaking a super-injunction taken out by a politician to prevent people reporting his infidelity. In those circumstances, the right to privacy would be harder to defend. Not only would I be in a stronger position, it would bring the conflict between privacy and free speech into sharper relief. Spending a couple of months in Wormwood Scrubs would be a price worth paying for exposing a cheating politician.
I consulted a solicitor after the Standard story appeared to see if I had anything to worry about. He thought not, but advised me that I might have a case in libel against the paper. Claiming someone is likely to be prosecuted when they aren’t is potentially libellous, though I have to be careful what I say here since accusing someone of libelling you when they haven’t is itself libellous. Perhaps the best response would have been to apply for a super-injunction to prevent the Standard reporting that I might be prosecuted for breaking a super-injunction. That would have been a good way of pointing up the sheer absurdity of our current privacy laws. I could have then broken my own super-injunction by tweeting about it.
Then again, perhaps it’s best to just let sleeping dogs lie.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
Comments