Mr Justice Tugendhat's decision to overturn his previous own ruling in favour of Terry prompted the Ministry of Justice to admit that the Government “is very concerned that super-injunctions are being used too frequently”. That hardly amounts to a determination to get rid of them altogether and, indeed, it might be reasonable to retain them in cases where the privacy of the litigant is genuinely in danger and the court cannot be convinced that the public interest is genuinely at stake. In Terry's case, it seems possible that the application would have satisfied the judge had it been based on the pain the allegations would cause Terry's family rather than focusing on the financial damage he might suffer because of the withdrawal of fees paid by sponsors – the sort of loss which has affected Tiger Woods from the defection of AT&T, Gillette and the consulting firm Accenture since his admission of “infidelity”.

On the question of public interest there were differences of opinion, even among football fans. Sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe (Bradford City and Manchester United) took one view: “On the field John Terry's a fantastic player and a good England captain,” Sky News Online reported him as saying, “but to be the captain of England you have got to have wider responsibilities for the country. If these allegations are proven... it does call into question his role as England captain. I speak to the FA on a regular basis so I will be asking what their viewpoint is and we will see what comes of it in the future.”

On the other hand, Alastair Campbell, in the Turf Moor Diaries blog that celebrates his support of Burnley, wrote: “He may be a multi-millionaire superceleb with a potentially legend-making World Cup ahead of him, but yesterday he was just one more man worrying what his missus was going to do to him when he got home from work.”

So this could be just one more example of the public being interested in events that are not necessarily in the public interest, a scenario used by Andrew Marr, when reiterating, in this issue of the BJR, his support for a privacy law. Clearly the Terry case is not an important matter of public concern, as was the oil trading company Trafigura's use of a super-injunction to prevent The Guardian reporting a parliamentary question about the “alleged dumping of toxic waste”. But such have been the highly-derided judgments delivered by Mr Justice Eady after employment of this indiscriminate legal firewall that it comes as no surprise when celebrities behaving badly are advised to reach for it as soon as an inquisitive newspaper starts probing.

The most obnoxious aspect of the super-injunctions is that their essence is secrecy – there is a reek of Star Chamber about the whole process. One particularly welcome aspect of Mr Justice Tugendhat's judgment was his criticism of Terry's lawyers, Schillings, for failing to inform the News of the World, which was getting ready to publish the Terry story, about the legal steps they were taking on the footballer's behalf. The judge's ruling demonstrates that there are severe limitations to the scope of superinjunctions. Now the Justice Ministry, involved in consultations with the judiciary and the media, has to find a way to bring them under control for the sake of open justice.

— BH