I am about to lose my journalist's ticket, my union card, my media cred. I think Tony Blair is right. He was, as he says, "a naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop" to have passed the 2000 freedom of information act in the form he did. In blowing apart the 30-year rule on government secrecy, he threw out the baby with the bathwater.
Blair made almost all public documents discoverable, down to the contents of every laptop, the first draft of every email, every text message, every scribbled note. It was, he now says, "utterly undermining of sensible government". Jack Straw and the former cabinet secretary, Lord (Gus) O'Donnell, agree with him. Total disclosure, they say, has damaged honest civil service advice and stifled confidential debate among ministers. Stupid amounts of official time and money are spent conserving archives and responding to FOI requests. There must be some limit.
Last year the media exulted over the WikiLeaks revelations of what American soldiers said in battle and what diplomats said about their host governments. Even the media felt this needed censoring. The outcome was liberating and purging, a glimpse below the surface of modern power. But the test should be whether diplomacy improved as a result. We do not yet know.
This is not just a matter of government. This week a US court ruled that tapes of IRA and protestant paramilitary interviews given in strict confidence to Boston academics should be handed over to the police, an outrageous breach of confidence. The Leveson inquiry demanded the clearly private text messages between David Cameron and a personal friend, albeit a News International executive. This was at an inquiry whose ironic purpose was to curb press intrusion into the privacy of the famous.
A Commons justice committee reviewing the 2000 act is about to announce that the genie is out of the bottle. There can be no going back to secrecy in the public sector. While there should be some "safe space" between ministers and officials, it is overruled by the public interest, which surely means everything. Disclosure includes even the most personal communication between individuals. When the education secretary, Michael Gove, tried to use a private email address for notes to his private staff, he was told to stop. For a minister there can be no such thing as private.
Even the most rabidly investigative newspaper or broadcaster does not believe in total indiscretion. What editors discuss with their staff and sources must depend on trust that confidences can be kept. As yet, we do not have the compulsory taping of office conversations or 1984-style in-house cameras. But we are getting close. Some time ago the Foreign Office told its staff to write nothing down it would not mind seeing in the Daily Mail. To officials, the "send" button is publish and risk being damned.
This is the digital revolution's Robespierre moment, the onset of the terror. According to the Commons committee, disclosure need acknowledge no limit of cost, inconvenience, sense of proportion or concern for unintended consequence. Yet the outcome of making all communication transparent is unlikely to make it more open. Officials are unlikely to become pocket Ciceros in the forum, rather party apparatchiks. Those with something controversial to impart to others will retreat to corridors, sofas, dinner parties, and crony intermediaries.
Is government better as a result? I do not think so. The headline-craving and ill-considered policies of this and recent governments do not suggest a smooth path from impartial advice to thoughtful policy all in the public domain. They suggest a rush from one reactive panic to another U-turn.
The idea that there should be no such thing as a secret is silly. Confidentiality is the essence of teamwork; it relies on layers of trust. Cabinets were once frank exchanges of views. In 2002, after FOI, the then cabinet secretary Sir Andrew Turnbull recalled that the number of cabinet papers fell from 146 when he had entered the civil service to just four. His predecessor, Lord Butler, commented that government had reverted to being an 18th-century "conversation among equals" sitting on a private sofa.
The essence of the postdigital universe is that nothing is as compulsive as human contact. Digital is a proxy, a portal, a facilitator, a message board. At the end is live experience. From a global summit to an office meeting, from an arts festival to a rave, online is always second best. So in government the default mode of leadership is live exchange. For a prime minister, the sofa is where honest thoughts can be exchanged beyond the reach of FOI.
Digital communication is crucial to modern government. It offers access to power across the board. It is the way in which advice can be given and received, but for this to be frank, documents must be able to stay private prior to policy being concluded; otherwise what is public will be banal and what is private will be left to backstairs lobbying, partiality and corruption or private exchange.
We are losing confidence in secrecy. Under section 44 of the 2000 terrorism act, the government regards anything in my camera as fit for the police to seize and inspect, "to determine whether images are of a kind which could be used in conjunction with terrorism", whatever that means. This paranoia is repeated in powers now being sought to intrude on the emails, not just of public officials but of private citizens. Just as government has no secrets from itself, it believes we should have none from it.
There is a public inquiry sitting into protecting celebrity secrets from press intrusion. That's fine. But what about confidences across the wider digital realm, public and private? If there is a public interest in revelation, there is surely sometimes a public interest in confidence.