A British politician has defied a court order on Monday by identifying Manchester United's Ryan Giggs as the soccer star fighting a legal battle to avert newspapers from publishing allegations of an affair, Reuters reported.

The release of Giggs' name will be seen as a victory for the media over celebrities and their lawyers after these events forced British Prime Minister David Cameron to go for a review of the privacy laws in the country.

The Sunday Herald, a Scottish newspaper which has its own legal system, published a thinly disguised photograph of Giggs on Sunday over an article and called the situation unsustainable to bar reporters from naming the player who was already identified in hundreds of Twitter postings as one of the celebrities using court orders to choke sex scandals.

Ryan Giggs, 37, is married with two children, and has an image as one of the sport's gentlemen. Lawyers representing the player had asked US based Twitter via a London court for information about the users who published details of the player's life.

John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat politician, used his parliamentary privilege which allows parliamentarians to raise controversial legal issues without fear of prosecution.