Status Anxiety: I’d rather be imprisoned for a better joke

Two weeks ago, the London Evening Standard outed me as one of four ‘celebrities’ who’d broken the super-injunction about Ryan Giggs. According to the newspaper: ‘Lawyers warned the stars could face a huge bill for damages after revealing the name of the Premier League footballer on microblogging site Twitter.’

My crime was to post the following tweet after the story broke that Giggs’s lawyers were going after the site’s American owners: ‘In other news, Ryan Giggs has decided to sue “the grapevine”. “We can’t have people gossiping over the garden fence,” said Schillings CEO.’ Rather a feeble joke and hardly worth going to jail for.

Luckily, nothing happened. The Standard’s story, which it ran on the front page, was prompted by a Commons statement from the Attorney-General the previous day. ‘Those who take an idea that modern methods of communication mean that they can act with impunity may well find themselves in for a rude shock,’ he said.

The Standard neglected to mention that Dominic Grieve also told the Commons that he had no intention of delivering this ‘rude shock’, since no referral had been made in relation to a contempt of court. The implication was that in the absence of the Hon. Mr Justice Eady referring an individual to him for breaking the super-injunction, he’d be unlikely to prosecute.

I thought I was out of the woods, but earlier this week the Attorney-General made another statement, this time on Radio 4’s Law In Action. ‘If you’re a tweeter and you’re susceptible to the jurisdiction of our national courts in England and Wales, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that you may find yourself being brought into court for contempt,’ he said. ‘I will take action if I think that my intervention is necessary in the public interest, to maintain the rule of law, proportionate and will achieve an end of upholding the rule of law.’