The weekend brought a whole new level of absurdity to the current controversy over injunctions. Scotland’s Sunday Herald published the identity of the anonymous footballer (I won’t name him, but we all know who I’m talking about) alleged to have had an affair with former Miss Wales Imogen Thomas (I can name her, though many claim not to have heard of her before she was injuncted by the footballer everyone has heard of but cannot name).

Meanwhile, a journalist and television presenter (who I cannot name) could face prosecution for tweeting insinuations about a footballer (a different one, who I also cannot name) playing away from home (fnar). Unnamed footballer number two had earlier gained an injunction preventing such claims from being published.

Brian Cathcart is pretty adamant that none of this is any of our business:

This is not a story about “freedom of speech”. That is just what they want you to think. It is a story about whether any of us has any privacy.

And one can understand the point: Who goes to bed with what is unimportant.

Not according to Nick Cohen in the Observer, who draws out attention away from the football pitch and into the boardroom, reminding us of the case of former Royal Bank of Scotland chief Fred Goodwin:

The judges’ ruling that there is no public interest in revealing the details of the wretched [Fred] Goodwin’s alleged affair shows that they do not understand where the lines should be drawn. It is as if they are still living in a world where men did not work with women — now I come to think of it, many of them do. Or perhaps they want to turn Britain into France and create an aristocratic society where the law protects rather than scrutinises the powerful. Certainly, they never take their lead from modern employers, who do not treat affairs between men in positions of power and women subordinates as private matters. Congress nearly impeached Bill Clinton for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky under oath. If the International Monetary Fund had listened to the Hungarian economist who said Dominique Strauss-Kahn so pestered her for sex she felt that “I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t”, it may not now be in its present predicament.

I agree with Nick.

The question we are left with is: if we are to have new standards on privacy to catch up the unpredicability, rapidity and ease with which information now spreads online, what do we take as the standard? Do we say the bedroom is always off limits? Does public interest only extend to criminality, malpractice or gross hypocrisy? Do the powerful or merely the popular automatically invite greater scrutiny?