I would love to tell you who the celebrity is, writes RICHARD LITTLEJOHN, but I don't fancy going to prison 

So who is the high-profile celebrity who has been cheating on his famous spouse and indulging in an illicit olive oil-assisted threesome, despite playing Happy Families in public?

I know his name, obviously, as does just about everybody else who works in what we used to call Fleet Street. It’s the talk of the showbiz world and the wine bars where lawyers and judges gather for a gossip over a glass of Chateau Thames Embankment.

And if Mr Rumpole knows, then so does She Who Must Be Obeyed and all the ladies in her bridge circle, who will naturally phone their sisters with the gory details the minute they get home.

Millions of Americans are aware of his identity, too. It’s been published in a tabloid newspaper, freely available at supermarket checkouts. By now, the news will have spread further afield to Australia, New Zealand and other Commonwealth countries.

I can imagine exactly what you’re thinking. Stop messing about, Rich. Just tell us who it is. Look, I’d love to, honestly I would. The problem is, I’m planning to go to Spurs against Manchester United on Sunday, so I’d rather not spend the weekend behind bars.

By law, I am forbidden to tell you, on pain of imprisonment. The individual concerned has obtained one of those super-strength Kryptonite-plated injunctions forbidding anyone from revealing his identity.

If I were to let it slip, I’d be in contempt of court and instead of taking my seat in the West Stand at White Hart Lane, I could be slopping out at the Scrubs, sharing a cell with some sex-starved armed robber who wants me to be nice to him.

To be honest, that’s not a prospect which inclines me towards spilling the beans — especially when, if you’re desperate to find out, there’s always the internet. It took me about 20 seconds to discover a website naming the couple.

But, as the law stands, newspapers are not allowed to identify the celebrity, his partner or even tell you whether they are heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or transsexual. We can’t identify the children, their gender, their ages, or how many of them there are.

We’re not able to name the other two people who claim to have taken part in the threesome, despite the fact that they approached a British newspaper offering to tell their story. Under the terms of the injunction, they’re forbidden from identifying themselves. That’s how stupid this is.

Nor can we reveal any other details of the infidelity which might assist anyone to so much as guess the name of the public figure or his famous partner, including the evidence produced by the U.S. tabloid to support its exclusive.

Sadly, we can’t even tell you if the olive oil involved was virgin.

Initially, it seemed as if we might be free to report the story. A High Court judge turned down an application for a privacy injunction because the plaintiff’s behaviour contradicted his public portrayal of his marital relationship.

The judge said the couple had presented an image of commitment and ‘there is a public interest in correcting it when the claimant has engaged in the sort of casual relationships as demonstrated in the evidence’.

But the celeb went to the Court of Appeal, saying he was in the entertainment business and married to a ‘well-known individual in the same business’.

Lord Justice Rupert Jackson said the couple had an open relationship and the spouse accepted the celebrity had sexual encounters from time to time.

Really?

That would come as breaking news to most people — which is why the papers want to report it.

Yet the Appeal Court granted the injunction on the grounds that any such story would generate a media storm, invite public interest in the family and expose the children to Press attention.

Lord Justice Jackson and Lady Justice Eleanor King ruled that it would be ‘devastating for the claimant’ and his need for privacy was greater than the right to publish.

The fact that this celebrity has made a career out of inviting public interest in himself and his family appears to be irrelevant.

He becomes the latest beneficiary of judge-made privacy laws designed to protect the rich, famous and powerful and shield them from the consequences of their own reckless behaviour.

One judge’s interpretation of what’s in the public interest is another judge’s idea of invasion of privacy. The courts seem to be making it up as they go along. Which, pretty much, they are.

It all went pear-shaped when Mr Justice Eady awarded £60,000 damages to the motor-racing mogul Max Mosley — son of Hitler sympathiser Sir Oswald — against the now-defunct News of the World, which had revealed his participation in a sordid, sado-masochistic orgy involving a bunch of prostitutes dressed in World War II German uniforms. Since then, the courts have decided that infidelity is a private matter under — yep, you guessed — European yuman rites law.

They seem to be taking their cue from Humpty Dumpty, in Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking-Glass, who loftily declared that words mean whatever he wants them to mean.

When it comes to defining privacy and public interest, the judges are deciding that the law means whatever they want it to mean.

In this case, Lord Justice Jackson concluded that publicity about the couple showed ‘not total marital fidelity, but rather a picture of a couple who are in a long-term, loving and committed relationship’ — presumably one in which olive oil-assisted threesomes with other people are perfectly acceptable.

Obviously, traditional marriage is just another lifestyle choice these days. This seriously flawed ruling appears to be as much a moral as a legal judgment.

For the record, I couldn’t care less what this so-called celebrity gets up to. But as the Mail said yesterday, it’s the hypocrisy of it all that stinks. In criminal circles, there’s a saying: If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. The same principle should apply to anyone who revels in publicity.

This latest ruling is part of a disturbing pattern, a concerted effort to use the law to gag the Press. But while newspapers are constrained, there are no such injunctions against the dissemination of news and gossip on the internet.

So who is the high-profile celebrity who has been cheating on his famous spouse and indulging in an illicit olive oil-assisted threesome, despite playing Happy Families in public?

The absurd 2,000-page Leveson Report devoted barely 20 pages to unregulated social media. No wonder the webmasters of the new Wild West pour scorn on the ‘dead tree’ Press as they locate their untouchable operations beyond the reach of domestic jurisdictions.

They’re already propelling the name of this celebrity and his partner around cyberspace.

So why do the judges think that the only people in the world who shouldn’t be told who he is are newspaper readers in England and Wales?

The injunction doesn’t even apply in Scotland, although as yet none of the Scottish papers have published his name — largely because if one copy crosses the border, they, too, could fall foul of the English courts.

It’s not as if his identity isn’t going to come out, just as the footballer Ryan Giggs was unable to suppress the fact that he’d been having an affair with his sister-in-law, despite spending a fortune on lawyers.

Britain gave free speech to the world, but it is being rapidly eroded by unelected, unaccountable judges, egged on by newspaper-hating zealots such as Hacked Off and public figures with something to hide.

As the media lawyer Mark Stephens points out, privacy law doesn’t exist in America, Australia or New Zealand, whose legal systems are all based on English Common Law. It is largely an invention of Continental Europe, designed to protect corrupt and philandering politicians, and has now been foisted upon us.

British judges are using infinitely flexible European human rights legislation to mould the law to suit the enemies of the public’s right to know.

And while we remain members of the EU, there’s nothing we can do about it, since acceptance of the human rights convention is a cast-iron condition of membership.

So, in future, if you don’t want to be told that you can’t learn the identity of any other publicity-seeking celebrity who is enjoying a little light olive-oil infused troilism, while posing as a happily married man in public, you know the answer:

Vote Leave.