In recent months, a flow of legal letters and orders has hit newspapers’ legal offices from actors, models and footballing personalities. That looks set to grow after this week’s ruling by Mr Justice Eady granting a temporary injunction to a high-profile sports figure who had an affair with another man’s wife banning the betrayed husband from naming him in the media.
In what is thought to be the first ruling of its kind, the judge said that even an adulterous figure had a "right to privacy" under the European Convention of Human Rights, in order to protect his wife and children.
Earlier this month the same judge granted a gagging order to a model and her husband preventing newspapers from reporting that their marriage had run into difficulties. The model was constantly the subject of media attention, the judge said, and much of the information that journalists wanted to put before their readers could "fairly be categorised as tittle tattle".
Mark Stephens, head of media at Finers Stephens Innocent, condemned yesterday’s ruling as "absolutely scandalous" and a "cuckolder’s charter".
"This makes a nonsense of the right to free speech. The law should not permit adulterers to hide behind the skirts of their wives and mistresses - their behaviour should be stripped bare for public scrutiny," he said.
"What we are going to see with the growth of this is primped and preened and manicured information supplied by spin doctors rather than the reality of how people live their lives."
Celebrities, Mr Stephens added, were entitled to as much privacy only as the ordinary person. "A local affair can be gossiped about in the village, in the church hall or rotary club and that can do as much damage as media publicity for the celebrity.
"What we will see is one law for the rich and those who can afford expensive lawyers."
But Antony White, QC, a media barrister at Matrix Chambers, sounded a more cautionary note about the ruling.
"I don’t think the impact is as wide as some have reported," he said.
The judge had been influenced by two unusual features in the case: first, the impact of the proposed diclosure on third parties - the wife and children - and second, that the defendant husband had shown himself motivated by spite and greed.
The judge will have weighed the two competing rights: that provided by Article 8, which protects the right to privacy, against that provided by Article 10, freedom of expression.
Alastair Brett, head of legal at Times Newspapers, said: "The courts have gradually been extending the common law of confidence in a piecemeal way into a privacy law. You can expose confidential information if it exposes iniquity - and that begs the question: should you be allowed to expose an adulterious relationship or not?"
But the problem was that the law was developing case by case, which meant that in any particular case it was not clear whether a right of privacy would prevail, he said.
"It is now being argued in some quarters that to comply with our European Convention obligations to provide a remedy against a breach of privacy, we need a privacy statute - and that Parliament should legislate."
The danger of such a law however, he argued, was that it would become a statute to "protect the immoral and the well-off".
Currently there are three cases before the higher courts that are set to define the boundaries of the law on privacy, which has started to emerge since the Human Rights Act took effect in 2000. They are: a House of Lords hearing over seized wedding pictures of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones; an appeal over the publication of a book by a former friend of Loreena McKennitt, the Canadian folk singer; and a case involving the Prince of Wales and publication of his private travel memoirs.
Two cases in 2004 shifted the balance against the media: a partial House of Lords’ victory for the supermodel Naomi Campbell over photographs of her outside Narcotics Anonymous; and a win for Princess Caroline of Monaco in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
In the Campbell case, the law lords held that even though the model was in a public place, the information was of a sort that most people would expect to keep private.
In the Princess Caroline case, the Strasbourg judges held that taking photographs of her in public places violated her right to privacy.
In the McKennit case, now going to appeal, Mr Justice Eady seemed to go further, saying: "To describe a person’s home, the decor, the layout, the state of cleanliness, or how the occupiers behave inside it . . . is generally regarded as unacceptable.
"To convey such details, without permission, to the general public is almost as objectionable as spying into the home with a long-distance lens."
