Ryan Giggs

I don’t have the right to know anything about Ryan Giggs’ private life. Neither do you. What Ryan Giggs or any other footballer, for that matter, gets up too is none of our business. In the same way that your indiscretions are no concern of mine nor are mine any concern of yours. Just because a person is known or famous or in the public eye doesn’t change any of this and the media can tart it up as a freedom of speech issue all they want, it isn’t. The bottom line is wherever Ryan Giggs sticks his cock is between Ryan Giggs, the recipient of said cock and his wife.
However... That didn’t stop me Googling until I’d found out it was him. O no, when I read that the mystery footballer had been named in the Spanish, Italian and Peruvian press I jumped on the computer. We all love gossip and we all want to hear the gossip; none of us want to be the last to know.
The press have been pulling their hair out. From day one commentators have solemnly informed us that they knew who it was yet, regrettably, they couldn’t tell us. Our ‘right to know’ had been blocked by 'out of touch judges' in the pay of wealthy men. Wealthy men who could sate their depravity without fear of discovery in exactly the same way we couldn’t.
This of course is bullshit. No one cares who we fuck. If I appeared on the front page of the Sun with a highly detailed list of my debaucheries no one would buy it. What I get up to only concerns a very small percentage of the population and although I’m sure they’d lap up any dirt on me I doubt very much it would sell much copy nation-wide. I wouldn’t need a super-injunction whether I could afford one or not.
Subsequently no tabloid in the land has any interest in me. Ryan Giggs does sell copy. He sells a lot of copy. As does Wayne Rooney (the gift that doesn’t stop giving). As does Ashley Cole who is always good for a laugh (he’s fully clothed, there are no women around, he’s not even on his phone… so he shots someone. Brilliant)
So for the last month the tabloid hacks have found them selves in an absurd situation. They knew before anyone else but they’ve had to watch as the foreign press broke the story; they’ve had to sit on their hands as the information floated around cyber-space and was lapped up by anyone who cared to know; lapped up by potential customers. All they’ve been able to do is keep the story alive, turn it into a freedom issue and in essence tread water until either the courts changed their minds or something major happen. All in the interest of selling more papers; the cause being our baser desires rather than our freedoms.
How infuriating. The jokes are getting old; everyone knows the football chants (singing ‘you’re not secret anymore’ was probably the only fun Blackpool fans had on Sunday) and generally having to watch the story go cold and not being able to say or print or sell anything.
So it was starting to look like Ryan Giggs was going to get away with it. If you ignore the fact that most of Europe and anyone with an internet connection already knew. He could consul himself that despite all that at least he’d stopped the British media making any money off his name. Then he shot himself in the face.
Just as it was starting to drop off the radar he upped the ante. He tries to sue Twitter. Very well done; you take the story off page four and make it headline news again. You alert a whole new group of tweeters and bloggers who haven’t even heard of you. Geeks take stuff like this very seriously; if you tell people they can’t talk about something, what are they going to do Ryan? They’re going to tweet, repost, joke and make your cock an internet trend. Very well done.
Giggs’ legal team was probably going with the assumption that the original tweeter was someone in the media therefore sue-able under the terms of the injunction. So a request for the page to be taken down and the name revealed probably didn’t seem out of the question. Personally I doubt the original tweets came from a journalist for the simple reason all journalists knew as did all politician and probably everyone in the legal hierarchy. Not to mention the whole of Man United and most footballers in the country and Europe. Therefore it’s safe to assume so did all their friends, spouses, children, extended families and people they talked to in the pub.
It could have been anyone!
So at exactly the point where he should have just kept his head down and wait for everything to blow over he launches a perceived attack on everybody. People are tribal, especially people online, it’s not called an online community for nothing; an attack on one is an attack on all. People with no interest in football, Ryan Giggs or the story up until that point suddenly felt obligated to re-tweet, re-post and send it into the stratosphere. Ryan Giggs had finally made it a freedom of speech issue. To stop the press selling the story is one thing but to try and prevent the sharing of jokes, gossip and banter between ordinary people is something completely different.
This action only served to make him appear arrogant with that premiership-footballer-sense of entitlement that the press so love to shove down out throats. A spectacular own goal. Very well done.
With the news of legal proceedings the clock was ticking; it was only a matter of time. If you look at the papers today you’d be forgiven for thinking the injunction had been lifted; it hasn’t. MP’s have parliamentary privilege but the press hasn’t. All the papers are doing is reporting what was said in parliament yesterday. Although the Sun headline comes perilously close to a breach of the order (‘It’s Ryan Giggs’) when you open the paper up it’s a straight forward report on an MP naming him. There’s another article on Imogen Thomas in one corner yet they don’t go as far as to link them both. In fact Ryan Giggs isn’t even mentioned in that article.
We all know. He knows we all know. But still his privacy is protected. The information has been out there for two weeks. It’s been published and reported in Spain, Italy, Peru and Scotland. No doubt the legal action on Twitter has brought the affair to the attention of America who, unlike us, does actually have a right to free expression. We have his name on the front page of our papers but what we don’t have are the details, all the sordid, mucky fineries of the affair all of which are absolutely none of our business. But we don’t want to know about them do we? We don’t need to know the where’s and when’s and how’s of what Ryan and Imogen got up too. Do we?

Do we?