WHEN I became a local government employee I discovered the wonderful world of performance indicators.

They’re the endless reams of statistics that are supposed to tell us whether we’re doing our job properly.

They were too complicated for me, so I devised my own way to assess things.

It was simply this. I would ask someone whether what they had done that day had made the town a better place. If the answer was yes, then that was generally good enough for me.

I have applied the test to this week’s revelations about Ryan Giggs.

Are we a better society, better people for knowing about his off-field activities? Do we have a spring in our step knowing that Mr Giggs or Sir Fred Goodwin weren’t always fully focused on the jobs they were paid so much to do?

The answer is no. The days when we believed that footballers were all in bed by nine o’clock dreaming innocently of starring in a Brylcreem advert, are long gone. We have had our eyes opened, painfully and expensively to the follies and foibles of the banking elite. Let’s face it, it takes a lot to shock us these days.

I was shocked, though, by the effrontery – there’s an old-fashioned word – of the MP John Hemming, who named Giggs.

Mr Hemming had Parliamentary privilege.

He’s had nothing worse than a tongue-lashing from the Speaker for flouting the courts.

Hemming didn’t even have the flimsy fig-leaf of a public interest defence that Lord Stoneham might just have invoked to justify naming Sir Fred.

No, he was playing to the gallery and it wasn’t an edifying sight.

Before MPs start posing as champions of the public’s right to know, they should look at their press cuttings.

A short time ago, they fought tooth and nail to conceal, preserve and justify an expenses regime that poisoned the relationship between Parliament and people.

They should remember, too, that in this country we have separation of powers between the law-makers, MPs, and those who dispense the law, the judges.

This division isn’t academic. It is one of those things that make us a democracy in which individuals have rights that can be tried, tested and upheld by courts free of political influence.

Judges, I suppose, come somewhere in between local authorities and estate agents in the public’s popularity chart. They get a bad press.

Often that is because they are applying laws that are deficient or badly drafted – MPs not doing their job again. I think the judiciary has a lot more commonsense and fairness than it is given credit for. Without them, there would be a free for all. The same, incidentally, applies to councils.

So, this argument isn’t, or shouldn’t be about Giggs or Goodwin. It is about our rights in a democratic society and how they’re upheld. There must be a public interest right to know, so we can call our rulers to account. But there must be a right to privacy too, if we want a decent society based on mutual respect and fair dealing. Those rights are best protected by courts, not publicity hungry MPs.

There’s an alternative – trial by tabloid.

But before politicians encourage that they should remember they will be the first ones in the dock; and that the court of public opinion deals out some harsh sentences.