He shoots, he scores! Pity it's an own goal.

Who would have thought that footballer Ryan Giggs' penis would cause a constitutional crisis?

Before we go any further, I should confess I've always had a bit of a man-crush on Ryan, ever since he first appeared as a fresh-faced football wizard all those years ago:

The other major attraction was that he had a deliciously, thickly-lush spread of manly chest hair manliness, which I utterly adored:

That and, as seems common among straight men, he wasn't shy of cavorting naked (or, at least, semi-naked) in the locker room:

A tradition he carries on today, although, regrettably, he has clearly succumbed to the evils of body shaving (or, as I think the weirdos who practise it describe it, "manscaping"):

That's him with beautiful team-mate David Beckham, although I don't know why Becks is so over-dressed (or Giggsy so under-dressed): maybe it's some sort of CMNM thing?

Enough of that: for those of my foreign readers who have no idea what's going on, a Member of Parliament yesterday used Parliamentary Privilege to name Giggs as being at the centre of a "super-injunction" storm. Super-injunctions are issued by the High Court to prevent the lurid or damaging details of a scandal being repeated or published -- and, unlike ordinary injunctions, the very existence of the super-injunction itself must also never be mentioned.

It's a way for super-wealthy slebs to ensure their tackier exploits don't get raked-over in the tabloids (in Giggs' case, it appears that he porked some minor non-entity a couple of times behind his wife's back, and he wanted an injunction to "protect his wife and child(ren)" from abuse and unpleasantness -- though if that were really his primary concern one assumes he would have been a bit more careful over who he porked).

Before the naming in Parliament he was named on more than 75,000 occasions on Twitter, although despite that all of us were supposed to pretend we didn't know (the mass naming was an "I am Spartacus" response to threats from the High Court to the handful of people who had already breached the super-injunction on Twitter).

Personally I couldn't care less who Ryan has porked (assuming, of course, that I am not in with a chance), but I'm not happy at super-wealthy people circumventing the basic principle of open justice. The courts are public institutions, the very bed-rock of our way of life, and, while it is perverse for the victims of blackmail, for example, having to have exposed during a trial the detail of the very material they were anxious to protect, that is the price we pay for having a justice system that commands respect. Justice, of course, must not only be done it must be seen to be done.

I'm happy to concede wide-ranging court orders at the margins where life and death are at stake (Mary Bell Orders and the like, which I vaguely remember endorsing recently), but most footballers court publicity through their pursuit of endorsements and their willingness to parade in trashy sleb mags -- they even try to turn themselves into brands. Having so assiduously cultivated the public interest they must then suffer prurient curiosity about all of their affairs. And they certainly should not be able to subvert a basic principle of our society in order to cover up their pathetic adulterous couplings.

Sorry, Giggsy: you've done way more harm to your image by the pursuit of this judicial gag order than if you'd just suffered a few weeks of minor embarrassment at the hands of the tabloids.