It's like having a judge who only rides horses and knows nothing about cars - deciding traffic cases.

Best summary ever of the British political tradition.

Why stop with modern technology? It's not just these web-site thingys which enable the plebs to peddle their pap. Telephones do the same job, and obviously need to be tightly controlled. The human voice, for that matter, is a notorious purveyor of false or forbidden information.

The moral of the story : electronic snooping is not enough to ensure the secrecy of the rich and powerful. An army of informers is required. Perhaps they can be recruted cheaply from central and eastern Europe, where they had a healthy tradition of such practices.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

A footballer has sued Twitter after a number of the microblogging site's users purported to reveal the name of the player who allegedly had an affair with model Xxxxxx Xxxxx.

Damn straight. And they should also sue the phone companies that those people used to send the messages.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

NEWSPAPERS in several countries not bound by an English injunction have identified on their pages a footballer who had an unreportable fling, but our media cannot show it.

The subject of an injunction has issued court proceedings in the UK against the US owners of Twitter, but they are not bound to comply and it has served only to disseminate his story to millions more than if it had just been published in the first place.

A journalist who named the subject of an injunction is facing contempt of court proceedings but cannot even be named himself under the rules of the original order even though he's accused of a crime, and a woman has been accused of blackmailing the subject of an injunction but barred from defending herself against the charge.

What is or is not in the public interest cannot even be properly discussed in a public forum, and a series of silly shagging stories are ramping up into a constitutional crisis with Parliament going head-to-head with the judiciary.

It's bizarre, it's ridiculous, and it's untenable.

Privacy rulings affecting newspapers are "unsustainable" and unfair on the press, the prime minister has said.

David Cameron told ITV1's Daybreak the law should be reviewed to "catch up with how people consume media today".

His comments came after Scotland's Sunday Herald became the UK's first mainstream paper to name a footballer who had taken out a privacy injunction.

The player, who began proceedings against ex-Big Brother star Imogen Thomas, has been named on Twitter.

A married footballer named on Twitter as having an injunction over an alleged affair with a reality TV star has been identified in Parliament as Ryan Giggs.

Lib Dem MP John Hemming named the player during an urgent Commons question on privacy orders.

Using parliamentary privilege to break the court order, he said it would not be practical to imprison the 75,000 Twitter users who had named the player.

Earlier the High Court again ruled that the injunction should not be lifted.

The lawyers, parliamentarians and political geeks are missing the point with this nonsense over the footballer who had an affair.  It's not about the conflict between Parliament and the Judiciary, nor rights to privacy vs free speech.  They have forgotten two very important facts leading to an inescapable conclusion:

1) The law is a socially constructed agreed set of rules  2) Rules only work when the punishment for disobeying them is perceived as being greater than the benefit

Like faeries, if you don't believe in them they cease to exist.  If society rejects a previously agreed set of rules by ignoring them, and the punishment inflicted for doing so is not enforceable, then the law may as well not exist.

The current situation is that, en masse, people decided that they don't believe in legal restrictions preventing the sharing of gossip.  It's not about tabloid manipulation of the gullible masses, the reach of English law to foreign shores, nor even an outbreak of absolutist principles on free speech, it's the democratisation of tittle-tattle and the deliberate rejection of rules to restrict this.  Previously gossip was restricted to one's social circle, or, in the case of a public figure, the interests of the tabloids, the decisions of judges and the wealth of the accused.  The internet has been a great leveller, one's position in society does not restrict access to knowledge, if there is gossip interesting enough to be shared it can and will be and the finest legal minds and bluntest legal instruments can do nothing to stop it.

Apart from the occasional passing reference, there was next to no mention yesterday of the issue of illegal phone hacking by newspapers.

This should not surprise anyone. With the exception of the Guardian, newspapers have tended to leave the story of systematic illegal activity by the News of the World well alone, for reasons likely to do with their own use or condoning of such practices. The news channels too have tended to cover the issue only when arrests or resignations have resulted.

The contrast with the zeal with which most of the media have pursued the superinjunctions issue, culminating in yesterday's full-on frenzy, could not be clearer.

Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have rapidly become a mainstream medium. The spanner in the works of their incredible rise is now the landmark case of Ryan Giggs suing Twitter for breach of a superinjunction. This issue has nothing to do with whether or not public figures should be able to gag the media through superinjunctions - whether 75,000 Twitter users, as the Lib Dem MP John Hemming used parliamentary privilege to point out, should be allowed to gossip about a footballer or not is irrelevant.

Is that it then? Hated judges defeated by popular uprising on Twitter? Government's failure to protect privacy risks condemnation by European court? Constitutional crisis as courts on collision course with parliament?

No, none of the above. Most newspapers seem to have given up trying to overturn the married footballer injunction, which remains in force. So does the order taken out by Sir Fred Goodwin, which continues to protect the identity of the woman with whom he had a relationship. John Hemming MP and his Lib Dem colleague Lord Stoneham have suffered widespread opprobrium for both undermining the authority of the courts and wasting the precious gift of parliamentary privilege.

As for Lord Wakeham's suggestion in the Telegraph on Wednesday that newspapers should be above the law and amenable only to the Press Complaints Commission on privacy issues, one does not have to look beyond the Telegraph's own recent breach of the editors' code to see how ineffective the PCC is at preventing and punishing invasions of privacy.

And while we're on the Telegraph, it's worth noting that Mr Justice Tugendhat chose to quote from several "inaccurate and misleading statements" made by the newspaper last week in a judgment he published on Monday. That ruling explained the judge's reasons for refusing to allow any further details of Goodwin's relationship to be published after Stoneham had named him in parliament.