Andrew Marr today admitted what anyone with access to an internet connection has known for years: that he obtained a superinjunction in 2008 to prevent the press reporting on his extramarital affair. Yet until 2009, when Private Eye launched a successful challenge, the mainstream media were banned from revealing even the existence of the injunction.
As the Eye reported at the time:
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So it was last year when Andrew Marr won an injunction to stop the media revealing “private information” about him – and to stop them revealing that he’d stopped them. Marr himself was on record arguing against a judge-made privacy law and calling for a public debate on the subject. Any such debate should include some reference to the effect of superinjunctions; yet Marr’s, like many others these days, was so draconian that one couldn’t mention its existence. Nor were we allowed to know on what grounds it had been given. After a long struggle by Lord Gnome’s lawyers, the order was varied so that we could at least say that he’d obtained it, while not repeating the story he wished to suppress.
The only reason Marr has now gone public in the Daily Mail (thus placating one of his fiercest critics) is to head off a challenge by Private Eye to the ordinary injunction. Unsurprisingly, the Eye editor, Ian Hislop, didn’t pull his punches on this morning’s Today programme, attacking the injunction as “pretty rank” and “hypocritical”.
Hislop was referring to the BBC presenter’s apparent opposition to judge-made privacy law. But, as Stephen Tall argues, Marr’s greatest offence was his decision to give voice to internet smears and ask Gordon Brown whether he was using “prescription painkillers and pills”. Marr’s attempt to probe into Brown’s private life, while using the courts to protect his own, was neither morally nor professionally acceptable.
He may now argue, conveniently enough, that superinjunctions are “out of control”. The question remains, however: if an exception is made for one, why not an exception for all?