Fred Goodwin farce: are super-injunctions doomed?

Yesterday's revelation in the House of Lords that the disgraced RBS chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin was granted an injunction to protect the secret of an alleged love affair with a senior woman colleague has raised two serious concerns.

First, how could the Financial Standards Authority properly investigate the demise of RBS - necessitating a £45bn bailout by taxpayers - if it was forbidden from learning that Goodwin was possibly involved in an extra-marital affair? There are now calls for him to be re-interviewed by the FSA so that the authority can establish whether the alleged relationship impaired his judgment.

Second: does this case prove that super-injunctions, hated by the media and those who campaign for a free press, are unenforceable anyway? Between Twitter users breaking the rules and politicians making use of parliamentary privilege, are they doomed?

Was Lord Stoneham right to 'out' Sir Fred?Few have any doubt that the Lib Dem peer, protected by parliamentary privilege, did the right thing, as a result of which the High Court changed the terms of the injunction, allowing publication of Sir Fred's identity though not that of his alleged mistress.

"The public interest defence for publishing details of Sir Fred Goodwin's love life is clear cut," writes David Prosser in the Independent. "This is a man who presided over one of Britain's biggest ever corporate collapses. Moreover, the ruin of Royal Bank of Scotland did not affect only its staff and shareholders, but everyone else in the country."

Prosser concludes: "Sleazy though it may be, the question of whether RBS's boss was too busy bonking to pay sufficient attention to the balance sheet is one of genuine public interest."

Or as Lord Stoneham himself put it rather more delicately in the Lords, "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 super-injunction to hide the alleged relationship between Sir Fred Goodwin and a senior colleague?"

What does the FSA do now?One issue for the Financial Services Authority is whether Goodwin broke the bank's own code of conduct regarding inter-staff relations.

According to the Lib Dem MP John Hemming, who first mentioned in the Commons in March that Goodwin was in possession of a super-injunction, the RBS code of conduct is "clear" that such relations should be declared to an individual's manager. In Goodwin's case, this would have been the bank's chairman, Sir Tom McKillop.

"It is important to know," says Hemming, "whether the chief executive [Goodwin] believed that this code of conduct applied to him or whether he was exempt from it".

Where does this leave the super-injunction?The use of parliamentary privilege by John Hemming and Lord Stoneham comes on top of the revelation by a Twitter user of the names of those recently awarded super-injunctions, including footballers and other celebrities. So, while the mainstream media - including The First Post - are bound by the gagging orders, a quick search online reveals the injunction-holders' names.

According to an editorial in today's Times, "When public figures shelter behind super-injunctions, they are not primarily protecting their privacy. They are keeping information out of the public realm that is clearly in the public interest...

"The Times has opposed super-injunctions in principle as an unwarranted freedom, granted to the wealthy and the privileged, to behave as they wish and preserve their anonymity. But it is becoming obvious that super-injunctions are now unenforceable in practice in any case."

The Times editorial continues: "If MPs and peers now make a habit of using the privilege of parliamentary sessions to challenge judicial rulings, the super-injunction ceases to be viable. It is to be hoped that this blatant fact will be recognised by Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, who publishes his recommendations for reform this morning."

Last word to MP John Hemming, writing in the Daily Mail: "Do not be fooled into thinking this is merely a debate about the private lives of a few celebrities that just happen to have taken advantage of the current direction of the courts. This is about something far more fundamental, and relevant to us all: ­ the right to know about wrongdoing in public life." ·