Super Injunctions

Jeremy Clarkson and Andrew Marr make unlikely bedfellows. And before either of them reach for their libel or privacy lawyers to injunct me, I speak not of any private relationship between the two but the legal issue that they have in common. Both applied for, and were granted, injunctions to protect aspects of their private life. But both 'voluntarily' gave up on those privacy injunctions.

Mr Clarkson told The Daily Mail the privacy injunction prohibiting the exposure by his first wife of aspects of his private life was rendered pointless by Twitter. While Andrew Marr confirmed in his written statement to the Joint Committee on Privacy, that while he had sought protection in the first instance to protect vulnerable others, he felt that injunctions should not last forever. 'I had never intended the injunction to be permanent. It was a useful emotional plaster at a very traumatic time, not permanent plastic surgery,' he wrote.

By falling on their private swords, do the actions of Messrs Clarkson and Marr invite us all now to give up on our privacy? Are court orders prohibiting unjustified invasions into private life really not worth the paper that they are written on as long as there is a blogger in a bed sit in Bognor or a Tweeter, in a townhouse in Tottenham on the scene? All of us are entitled to live some sort of private life, the blogger and the Tweeter, the private individual and the public figure. The fact that Mr Clarkson may have decided, albeit reluctantly, to...