As I'm sure you know by now Trafigura has dropped the gagging order against the Guardian which prevented the paper from reporting a parliamentary question mentioning the company, a freedom supposedly guaranteed by the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Trafigura and law firm Carter Ruck scored a spectacular PR own goal - within minutes of the gagging story appearing on the Guardian website last night it was all over Twitter and the blogosphere. As I went to bed at around 1am last night the words "trafigura" "carter ruck" "dumping" and "toxic waste" were being tweeted over and over by Twitter users, including me, to spread the word and raise awareness by getting the topic trending on Twitter. By the time Stephen Fry tweeted this morning dubbing the injunction "a barbaric assault on free speech" hundreds of thousands of people who had never heard of Trafigura before knew all about their evil actions dumping toxic waste off the Ivory Coast. 

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger was preparing to challenge the injunction in court at 2pm when the news arrived that Trafigura had buckled in the face of the barrage of a negative online publicity. At around 12.50pm he tweeted "Victory! #CarterRuck caves-in. No #Guardian court hearing. Media can now report Paul Farrelly's PQ about #Trafigura".

You can listen to Rusbridger discuss the whole affair in this Guardain podcast - it seems that the Guardian was under a "super-injunction", which prevented it both from reporting on Trafigura and from mentioning the fact it was under an injunction. When it learnt that a parliamentary question about the company was going to be asked by Paul Farrelly MP, it contacted Carter Ruck who happily provided the public cause the paper was after by replying that the question was covered by the injunction and the Guardian would be in contempt of the court's order in reporting it.

Although I've not yet had this confirmed, I'd be very surprised if the Guardian didn't work with Farrelly, who is a vocal critic of our libel laws, on this. Indeed, as Sarah Ditum writes, the whole course of events from the carefully coded initial Guardian non-coverage of the story, to the Farrelly question, to Rusbridger and his colleagues' hyper-active tweeting, suggests that the Guardian "gamed" Trafigura and Carter-Ruck with a brilliantly executed counter-punch.   

This letter appeared in Saturday's Guardian:

MPs returning to Parliament this week might like to think that the fury they faced earlier in the year due to the expenses scandal is now behind them. Yet the storm was as great as it was because of an underlying sense of alienation that has been developing for years.

Some of the ideas which emerged during the conference season aimed at closing this gulf between the political class and the public have been positive contributions, but none of them amount to the sort of fundamental change which we now desperately need. In particular, while Gordon Brown's support for holding a referendum on electoral reform is a welcome shift, the promise of a vote on an electoral system hand picked by the Prime Minister will be greeted by much cynicism.

The UK needs an independent citizens' convention to ensure that such decisions cannot be skewed by political self-interest. It is too late to complete such a convention before the general election, but it could be legislated for and begin its work in a matter of weeks. Its work could then progress regardless of which party goes on to form the next government.

After a rather dull and uninspiring Guardian fringe event on "fixing politics", at which the most radical constitutional idea was for more elected mayors, I didn't hold out much hope for the Conservative Action on Electoral Reform debate on democracy this afternoon. But it turned out to be a lively affair and good fun.

We were packed into a small room which CAER had clearly been given in the expectation that electoral reform doesn't really do it for Conservatives, but in the end it was standing room only.

Jonathan Isaby of Conservative Home chaired a panel which included Dan Hannan MEP, Peter Facey of Unlock Democracy, shadow justice minister Eleanor Laing and Lewis Baston, Keith Best and Ken Ritchie from the Electoral Reform Society. They were the "dragons", there to comment on the different ideas for reform that were pitched to them by Tory activists and thinkers.

First up was Philip Blond who pitched the idea of a second chamber made up of representatives of civil society associations, Burke's "little plattoons" as he described them. He argued that this would strengthen representation and guard against vested interests by empowering those groups we find meaning in in a way that moves us beyond an atomised society of individuals.

Hannan - in what may or may not have been intended as a compliment - compared this to similar "corporatist" schemes ran by Mussolini and the Portugese dictator Salazar. The preference of most on the panel, and in the room, was for direct elections by the people.