Gordon Ramsay’s father-in-law and former business partner Chris Hutcheson has failed in a bid to obtain an injunction to gag the press in a privacy case involving his family.
Hutcheson can be named after the Court of Appeal yesterday partially lifted a cloak of anonymity over the legal action.
He had appealed against a refusal last December by High Court judge Mr Justice Eady to grant him an interim injunction restraining newspapers from publishing “private information”.
Hugh Tomlinson QC, for Hutcheson, said the case related to “family issues – conduct which might well be said to be morally blameworthy but not criminal or regulatory misconduct.”
Upholding Mr Justice Eady’s decision, the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, said today: “We consider he was right to dismiss KGM’s (Mr Hutcheson’s) application for restraint on publication of certain information.”
Tomlinson had said earlier Hutcheson’s case was that the information he was seeking to keep out of the newspapers was “purely a private matter of concern only to him and a small number of other individuals”.
He was “not a public figure, not a premiership footballer” and he did not hold any public office or official position.
Hutcheson was sacked by his celebrity chef son-in-law last October following public falling out.
Today the Master of the Rolls, sitting with Lord Justice Etherton and Lord Justice Gross, said the court would consider tomorrow what material from the High Court judgment could now be disclosed to the public.
He warned that, until then, details of the judgment must not be published.
But he added that newspapers and the media could use information about the case before then if it came “from an independent source”.
The appeal court decision was a victory for the publishers of The Sun, Daily Mirror and Daily Mail, which had opposed Mr Hutcheson’s application for a gagging order.
Today, The Sun and the Daily Mail published a detailed reports about the information surrrounding his private life which Hutcheson had sought to suppress.
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