Andrew Marr admits he used super-injunction to stop reports of affair

BBC presenter Andrew Marr yesterday revealed that he took out a super-injunction after admitting feeling "embarrassed" about using the law to silence reports of his affair with a fellow journalist.

Mr Marr, 51, the corporation's former political editor, won a High Court order in January 2008 to silence the press over his extra-marital relationship.

He believed he had fathered a child with the woman, a political journalist, and made maintenance payments until he discovered through a DNA test that he was not the girl's father.

Ian Hislop, editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye - who has been fighting the so-called gagging order and challenged the injunction only last week - attacked Mr Marr's behaviour as "a touch hypocritical" .

He said: "As a leading BBC interviewer who is asking politicians about failures in judgment, failures in their private lives, inconsistencies, it was pretty rank of him to have an injunction while working as an active journalist.

"I think he knows that and I'm very pleased that he's come forward and said 'I can no longer do this'."

Mr Marr wrote a newspaper article in 1997, while he was editor of the Independent, saying that parliament, not judges, should determine privacy law.

"There is an argument about whether to allow judge-made law to accumulate or to have a clean, honest, open debate in parliament. I'm enough of a traditionalist to believe that is what should happen rather than allow it to be settled by judges," he wrote.

The injunction is one of a series of court orders granted by judges in recent years as individuals resort to the law to protect their privacy.

Speaking yesterday about the order, Mr Marr - who has three children with his wife, newspaper columnist Jackie Ashley - said he now felt "uneasy" about the order taken out to protect his family's privacy.

He said: "I did not come into journalism to go around gagging journalists.

"Am I embarrassed by it? Yes. Am I uneasy about it? Yes."

But he added: "I also had my own family to think about, and I believed this story was nobody else's business. I still believe there was, under those circumstances, no public interest in it."

But he said the use of injunctions now seemed to be "running out of control".

"There is a case for privacy in a limited number of difficult situations, but then you have to move on. They shouldn't be forever and a proper sense of proportion is required," he said.Under the terms of the injunction, the media have been banned from publishing any details relating to the indiscretion.

His comments come amid growing disquiet at the use of injunctions and super-injunctions by public figures to prevent reporting of their private lives.

A Liberal Democrat MP yesterday used parliamentary privilege to name a woman he said a council tried to jail for speaking in Westminster.

John Hemming, who previously used privilege to name former Royal Bank of Scotland Sir Fred Goodwin as the subject of a High Court super-injunction, spoke out again about the use of injunctions, censorship and creeping privacy laws.

Mr Hemming told MPs: "Vicky Haigh, who is a horse trainer, was the subject of an attempt by Doncaster Council to imprison her for speaking at a meeting in parliament." He said the court ordered she should not be jailed, adding: "I assume therefore the case is not sub judice."