How ironic that at a hearing about privacy and free speech, only the chairman decides what can and cannot be said about a certain Tom Watson…

“Would [the speaker] accept that every taxpayer has a direct public interest in the events leading up to the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland? So how can it be right for a superinjunction to hide the alleged relationship between Sir Fred Goodwin and a senior colleague? If true it would be a serious breach of corporate governance and not even the Financial Services Authority would know about it.”

In March Guido told you about it, but had to adhere slightly to the courts. Sorry if you couldn’t quite work it out:

“So there was this ****** bloke who worked closely with another ****** colleague, they apparently began an adulterous affair not long after the ****ing crisis of 2008. He went to Court to stop it getting out that he had been banging her. Because he is the most notorious ****** of his generation he also banned references to his profession lest he be identified.”

Well that went well for Fred didn’t it? Worth every penny…

Only a king too weak or too arrogant would find a jester insufferable. Jesters strengthened kingdoms.

It seems to Guido that today the rich and the powerful are too arrogant and perhaps too afraid of the media, much as weak kings feared the jester, they fear an unfettered free press.

In an age of moral relativism the court of public opinion is so often the only one we have in which to judge public figures. The politician who disports himself naked in parliament - like Nigel Griffiths did – may feel no shame, his wife may be blameless, his party may stay silent, but should he really be able to hide his foolishness from the voters? Should he be able to go to the Courts to protect his privacy after literally cavorting with his lover in the public offices of parliament? He won an injunction to stop a free press reporting the full truth about him to his voters. That seems to Guido to be dangerous to our freedom and to the exercise of informed choice in a democracy.

Celebrities who use their wholesome image to endorse products similarly protect their commercial value using the Court to cover up their sordid reality.

Celebrities, soap stars and footballers go to Courts of Law to avoid being judged by the court of public opinion. If they succeed they escape censure and society is worse off in two ways; public figures get away with behaviour which society rightly disdains and they still manage to project a false self-image without the truth being exposed to the society they deceive. Secondly there will exist in society those who know the truth about public figures – mainly people in the media, politics and the law – and those who are kept ignorant like Roman plebeians.  That can’t be right.

Fear of widespread humiliation and popular opprobrium are two social restraints on the tendency of flawed humans to succumb to their baser instincts. It is an unfortunate fact that many of the characteristics which drive men to power are the same that make them scoundrels. If society wants those who rise to fame and fortune to behave less scandalously, society should keep the justified fear of exposure by a free press as a restraint. Muzzle the press by protecting the privacy of public figures and public life will be even more dominated by unreported scoundrels.

As the anger grows over Andrew Marr’s audacity at paying to hide his own public interest story, while being paid to probe the lives of the rest of the political class, Guido thought he would gauge opinion:

Don’t forget we pay him £600,000 a year for the pleasure. No wonder he could afford the luxury of an injunction and to support a child that wasn’t even his.

With Andrew Marr currently topping the Twitter trends in the UK, that well known Yes2AV campaigner with a superinunction must have shaky hands today while they are stuffing envelopes.

The politics of that story aside, Marr was not the right person to be seeking the truth. Was the BBC officially aware of the conflict of interest?

“We all believed we could reach small audiences and advertisers would pay for that. But it did not pan out. The internet is mass media.”

While Rob Winnett was suspected after vocally challenging the paper not revealing the whole story, what a coincidence that Jane was also secretary to the previous editor, and Peston’s mate, thirsty Will Lewis. Guido has noted Lewis and Peston’s mutually beneficial friendship before…

UPDATE : Other Telegraph sources insist it was a regular reorganisation redundancy.

This month’s Vanity Fair will make for awkward reading for not only MacAskill, but Blair, Straw and Salmond too. David Rose’s deep investigation concludes that Salmond had a remarkable change of heart about releasing the only person convicted of the mass murder on his patch after he cut a deal with Straw to save a few million. The Scottish executive was facing numerous legal cases over making prisoners use slop buckets. According to an official listening in to phone calls

“Salmond indicated that the Scottish government would drop its objections if the Parliament in Westminster would engineer an amendment to the Scotland Act,”

A change that would kill the legal action from former prisoners dead in the water. Salmond’s spokesman Kevin Pringle says the story is “complete and utter garbage without a shred or scintilla of truth.” That’s the same Kevin Pringle who doesn’t have the greatest track record in being open and frank with the facts.

Seeing a passing bandwagon, attention craving Jemima Khan decided to delve deep into her family’s wealth to help bail out Julian Assange. Explaining her decision she wrote:

“I believe that this is about censorship and intimidation… On the one hand, the US is proud of its First Amendment and its long-standing commitment to the freedom of speech…On the other hand, it is examining ways to take legal action against Assange, who is in effect editor of the world’s first stateless (non-profit) media organisation… WikiLeaks offers a new type of investigative journalism… I feel passionately that democracy needs a strong and free media.”

A noble sentiment perhaps, but Khan hasn’t always put her money where her mouth now is, in fact quite the opposite. She seems to have suffered slight amnesia forgetting the time when she wasn’t such an advocate for free speech. The Goldsmith consiglieres, with the aid of Carter Ruck, flipped a switch when their super-injunction gagging order was leaked to, wait for it… Wikileaks:

WIKILEAKS PRESS RELEASE / EDITORIAL
December 24, 2008

December the 15th saw a secret UK court hearing, with secret participants, produce a secret order to secretly gag the population, the terms of which are secret and the revelation of which is punishable by up to 10 years of imprisonment. How many of these orders exist is unknowable—we glimpse at the severity of the problem only when the orders are violated. So let’s start violating them.

Wikileaks previously released the gag order for the Northern Rock bank collapse, now we release the secret gag order made by High Court Justice Tugendhat on Dec 15, 2008 aimed at covering up an email leak from the British establishment. The secret order first targeted UK newspapers, but our copy was destined for the UK Parliamentary blogger ‘Guido Fawkes’, editor of ‘order-order.com‘. The summary states:

1. The identities of the Applicants/Claimants must remain confidential.
2. The fact of the existence of the Orders must remain confidential.
3. The terms of the Orders must remain confidential.

The order concerns emails from Zac Goldsmith, a noted 2005 Conservative party recruit, and social climber sibling Jemima Khan. Both are heirs to the late billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith. Needless to say there are no teachers, small business owners or technicians being granted secret media gag orders in the UK.

The order states that anyone who knows of the order must obey it, so plaintiff lawyers Carter Ruck have served the order on media outlets across the British Isles.

Britain is an increasingly dangerous Western disgrace, but you won’t hear about it in the British press.

Oh the irony, needless to say Guido told them to get stuffed…