Andrew Marr's TV guests torment him over superinjunction

The journalist Andrew Marr must have longed, if not for a gagging order, at least for an actual gag, as guests on his own television show tormented him over the superinjunction whose existence he publicly admitted last week.

"It's a great week to hide an injunction story, say one wanted to," mused the actor Maureen Lipman, one of the guests invited to review the Sunday papers on the BBC1 news programme, as she surveyed the acreage of royal wedding coverage crowding out almost all other topics.

"You cheeky woman ... yes, this is true," Marr responded.

It was his first show since he revealed the existence of the injunction, which barred any coverage of his affair with another journalist and the child he believed was his own, or of the existence of the injunction. Marr said he had become "uneasy" as a journalist at having obtained it.

Chris Bryant, former Labour Europe minister, told the Observer the controversy would "hobble" his capacity as a journalist, as politicians and other interviewees could use it as an excuse to evade any probing questions.

Bryant said: "People will certainly look askance at him. He is not going to be able to ask the personal questions without people, including politicians, sticking their tongues out at him and saying 'superinjunction' and refusing to answer."

In the event Marr seemed more acutely embarrassed than hobbled as he returned to the screen five days after admitting that he had taken out the superinjunction.

Another of his guests, the historian Simon Schama, discussed with Lipman the profile in the Sunday Times headed "Old Jug Ears, daddy of the super-secret".

Marr conceded that "the superinjunction issue is not going to go away".

But he also described the Sunday Times profile as "a slightly disobliging piece but the worrying thing is the picture is both rather unpleasant and also entirely accurate, so there we go".

Schama said the issue of balancing the right to privacy against free speech was a big one: "It's obviously going to be something, presumably, parliament has got to consider."

Marr agreed: "It's something clearly parliament is going to have to look at again. MPs are going to have to look at this."

While the Andrew Marr Show focuses on parliamentary and policy issues, in recent years Marr has posed questions about the vexed personal lives of several prominent guests.

When John Prescott went on the show at the end of his career as an MP, Marr referred explicitly to the affair the former deputy prime minister conducted with a colleague.