CTB, ETK, BCD – superinjunctions and the idiocy of suing the internet

I’m bored with the superinjunction brouhaha, so after extensive research on the internet I’ve decided to reveal the identities of all the Scots personalities involved.

I have not done this lightly, having the deepest respect for England’s well-thought-out legal system. But I feel that free speech is the most basic of rights and I’m willing to risk all in its defence. Here goes: ETK is Jimmy Krankie, hiding her 50-gram-a-day Tunnock's Teacake habit. BCD is Paw Broon trying to silence allegations that he’s from Dundee. RST refers to Alex Salmond’s “McBungaBunga” sessions, featuring himself, a korma and a copy of the Racing Post. The superinjunction hides whether the meat in the korma is lamb or chicken. JIH is struggling to get a panto gig this year and is trying to boost their flagging career by pretending there’s something interesting about their private life. HCE and ALP are characters from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which makes a whole heap more sense than the English legal “system”. GIRUY is the Scottish electorate’s response to Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems. YMCA was a 1979 hit for which flamboyant disco group? And can I just add the word “allegedly” to all of the above, as I’ve done not a shred of research? When I say “not a shred of research”, I mean I’ve waded through the superinjunction Twitter feeds and the online shared spreadsheet of injunction “facts”. I have no idea whether these are reputable sources or not – as they are anonymous – and neither does anyone else. Because we can’t say who is covered by superinjunctions, we can’t say who is not, which means that some harmless celebs will be having their names unfairly blackened by Dame Rumour. The lists in question struck me as depressing. While there are some cases that require protection for understandable reasons, most are dismal nonentities hiding sordid peccadilloes. The bottom line is that none of the entities involved are worth sacrificing our freedom of expression for. They do all have one thing in common: they’re all idiots. Their names will come out (have come out) and they’ll have wasted hunerts of thousands of pounds failing to hide their identities and opening themselves to vituperation for messing with our basic freedoms. Let us, like Imogen Thomas (allegedly), take Ryan Giggs OBE, CTB. Footballer has sex with “moddull” (allegedly) is a flash-in-the-pan story. Strictly “tomorrow’s chip paper”. He’d have had an uncomfortable weekend, (allegedly) hiding the papers from Mrs Giggs. That would have been it. But now he has spent a fortune to become an archetype of arrogant idiocy – the (alleged) adulterer who tried to sue the internet. The next logical step is surely to sue the Commons, after John Hemming MP used parliamentary privilege to out the footballer. Then he can complete his transformation from winger to punchline. I hope for Giggs’s sake that he had a “no anonymity, no fee” clause in his arrangement with his lawyer – but, given that his head is the third most likely location for his brains, I doubt it. The one cheering thing in all this is that people with more money than sense have wasted a lot of money doing something eminently unsensible. Perhaps that will give others pause for thought.

Note: The following is a satirical song from a third party and in no way seeks to reveal anything about anybody.

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