The CLASSIFIEDS – OPEN to ALL

Each day, another breach of security is reported. Everybody tut-tuts and says that the government is hopeless. The government says it is enquiring into the breach and such things will not happen again. But they do.

This needs to be put in context. The security services have always been terrible at … um … security. We have a friend who worked at the Admiralty in the 1970s. He says that everybody was wholly cavalier with secret information. Filing cabinets of classified files were routinely left unlocked and unattended. Papers from restricted files would lie on desks for days on end. It sounds like the Ealing Comedy version of Whitehall but the reason that Ealing Comedies were so convincing is that they were true.

In those days, the professionals may have been lax but the climate was otherwise. To risk the disclosure of state secrets was thought to be the gravest of crimes. The newspapers operated a self-denying ordinance called the D-Notice whereby editors agreed that they would not publish any classified material that came into their hands. Reporters like Chapman Pincher who specialised in covering intelligence work were more likely to cooperate with the authorities than to embarrass them.

Whenever any material covered by the Official Secrets Act did leak out, the government of the day would invoke extraordinary powers to seal the leak and punish those journalists thought to wish the authorities ill. The latter would routinely be hauled before some specialist court of law and be expected to defend themselves without the prosecution being obliged to disclose fully of what they were accused.

It will be noted that the emphasis then was on the receipt rather than the delivery of classified information. For sure, “passing secrets” was a grave – at one time a capital – offence. But accepting such material, especially for the purpose of embarrassing the government, was usually considered the more heinous sin, at least by successive home secretaries.

The climate is very different now. We have become so jaded and cynical that we believe the state has no secrets worth keeping. The laxity of civil servants and jobsworths in the intelligence and other public services is now what catches the media eye. I feel sure that highly sensitive paperwork has been left on trains since Brunel’s time, but now it is reported and thought lamentable. This is primarily because a great deal more of the data now held by the authorities concerns the innocent citizenry rather than the threatening spooks. We want government to look after those interests that are more obvious and urgent to most of us than the security of the nation. What is to be done?

One thing suggests itself immediately. Make the failure to carry out the duty of care that falls on all individuals handling classified material a prosecutable offence. The nitwits who not only took home stuff that should never have left the office but forgot it when they alighted from their commuter trains should be appearing in court very soon. Let’s see who they are and be told what wince-making penalty they will suffer for their stupidity. This would certainly have a swift effect, not least pour encourager les autres.

Better yet, it would make the government appear decisive and tough-minded. Rather surprisingly, given his previous reputation for bullying and bluster, Gordon Brown has been more a mouse than a lion since receiving the keys to no 10 Downing Street. Rather too much hand-wringing – whether over Burma and Zimbabwe or the economy and the incompetence of civil servants – has been indulged. It’s high time that the government made someone a whipping boy before that role falls to the prime minister.