RYAN Giggs will have spent tens of thousands of pounds to keep his private life out of the newspapers – and he had the law on his side.

But that didn’t stop his cover from being blown thanks to an MP and the determined efforts of thousands on the micro-blogging website Twitter.

The intervention of Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming leaves the law on privacy more confused than ever.

Tobias Ellwood, Conservative MP for Bournemouth East, said he was “uncomfortable” that Mr Hemming had used the tradition of parliamentary privilege to name Giggs in the Commons.

“The libel law urgently needs reviewing. It didn’t need Hemming to stand up in parliament to tell us that,” he said.

“I don’t think it was a good day for parliament.”

Lauren Day, solicitor in the dispute resolution department at Ellis Jones solicitors in Bourne-mouth, said: “The difficulty comes from the Human Rights Act. You’ve got a right to privacy and you’ve got the right to freedom of speech and nobody’s ever really reconciled the two.

“Rather than parliament seizing the issue and trying to legislate about it, case law has developed to try and make a law that’s operable.”

She said Mr Hemning’s intervention went “way beyond what parliamentary privilege is supposed to allow”, following thousands of people naming Giggs on Twitter.

“I think the problem you’ve got is that you can enforce a court order in England but all that needs to happen is somebody emails someone in America, then someone in America tweets it.”

“You apply to a court and say there’s this court injunction in place but because it’s now in the public domain, it can be lifted.”

She added: “Obama signed a law in America that all internet providers are immune from prosecution and you can’t enforce an English judgement in America.”

Tobias Ellwood believes the way forward must lie in international agreements, such as those reached on internet piracy.

Bournemouth West MP Conor Burns blames the problems on the Human Rights Act of 1998, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into British law.

“Who really cares about what Ryan Giggs did or didn’t do? But I think John Hemming has done us a favour by pointing out that due to the Human Rights Act, Britain’s judges are de facto making a privacy law that parliament never debated and never voted on,” he said.

“We need to revisit the Human Rights Act.”