Injunction—Private and confidential information—Sexual relationship between claimant and colleague

Queen’s Bench Division, Tugendhat J, 9 Jun 2011

The High Court has given guidance in the circumstances in which the parties to a sexual relationship may or may not hold a reasonable expectation of privacy in respect of that relationship, and when it may or may not be in the public interest for disclosure of the fact (but not the details) of a relationship.

Richard Spearman QC (instructed by Farrer & Co) for the respondent. Hugh Tomlinson QC (instructed by Olswangs) for the interested party, VBN. The claimant did not appear and was not represented.

The claimant was the former head of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). He had received much adverse publicity since leaving the bank, which had had to be rescued with vast sums of public money. The defendant was the publisher of the Sun newspaper. On 1 March 2011, it contacted the claimant with an allegation that he had had