The person on the left bumping uglies with the person on the right.
Not that I want to be cruel about it, but while I find Clarkson to be quite entertaining sometimes he’s not exactly got the physique that dissolves knicker elastic from across a room, has he? Not so much a sixpack stomach as a firkin, which is probably appropriate for a middle aged man who likes a glass of wine. Speaking as someone who could drop a few kilos himself Clarkson makes me look good, and since he clearly doesn’t give a rip about conforming with the health nazis’ demands for him to be the right shape and size fair play to him. But if he’s charmed his way into Jemima Khan’s pants that’s frankly astonishing and would force me to review nearly everything I’ve ever called bullshit on from wild theories about Bin Liner’s death through every 9/11 conspiracy idea, the Apollo moon landings being filmed anywhere other than the actual moon, 1+n gunmen in the JFK shooting, and every bit of every religious text including all the self contradictory stuff. Khan herself is saying it didn’t happen and there’s no injunction.
Except that I really don’t care much if it did and they have, and if it’s an old fling in the past it’s of even less interest. The use of super injunctions by slebs and pollies to cover up who’s shagging whom is a matter of great indifference to me. I really find myself physically unable to give a shit except for two points. First, since the subjects can’t be named it’s inevitable that there’ll be a lot of speculation naming various people, and equally inevitable much of it will be wrong. Take for example the identity of the mysterious and injunctified ETK, about whom we are told little more than that he’s an entertainer and a married father of two. Some parts of the web have said that ETK is absolutely definitely Clarkson and that there’s absolutely no doubt about it, having clearly missed the fact that Clarkson is actually a married father of three. Is he one of the others? Don’t know and frankly I don’t care – the point is that there are more names being bandied around than there are injunctions and therefore some are being accused of things they haven’t done. Better for there to be no injunctions so those who aren’t involved don’t get dragged into something they have nothing to do with just because gagging orders means that scatter gun speculation on the interwebs is about all that’s left.
Secondly, and rather more seriously than the impact on some sleb’s career/family/lunch or whatever, the existence of super injunctions at all allows the quiet burial of things that are far more important than who may or may not have done the horizontal tango with someone they shouldn’t have. Think back to the first one of these that made big waves, the Trafigura injunction preventing reporting of what was said in Parliament – fucking Parliament. Okay, it still had to be made available in Hansard but people don’t exactly check Hansard every day. We rely on others to report what’s going on there, and even an attempt to prevent that should have rung alarm bells. It was only poetic justice that that injunction eventually bought them a massive case of the Streisand Effect and millions of people who would otherwise have never heard of Trafigura not only became aware of them but also found out that they’d been dumping toxic waste in the sea off Côte d’Ivoire. Now, if some unnamed sleb can get an injunction so powerful that it prevents reporting any details of any kind, all just to keep readers of ‘Ullo! and OhChrist from having a gossip about them, what’s to stop a politician or a corporation with some dirt they don’t want coming out from doing the same thing?
The thought of Jemima Khan going reverse cowgirl on Jeremy Clarkson seems as unlikely as it is unappealing, but at the end of the day if it actually happened then it’s something that really doesn’t affect anyone else beyond their immediate families. But the thought that another Trafigura could use the same legal device to cover its arse is a good enough reason for these super injunctions not to exist at all.