The government's latest ploy in the Green affair is to attempt to discredit the Conservatives by challenging us to say whether we would be happy for the Home Office or other key departments to be subject to long-term sustained leaking. If we would be unhappy with that, which we surely would have to be, then presumably we would want it investigated - which is what the government has done. What else was there to do?
I'm not a fan of government leaks (actually, I am a fan in the sense of being interested in them when they occur, but I am talking here about whether I would prefer a world with more or fewer leaks). Leaks by government officials to political opponents of the government represent a particularly unsavoury sort of leak, since at the very least they involve civil servants betraying the trust placed in them by their employers, and may even involve outright illegality in cases to which official secrets acts would apply. Civil servants leaking to the government's political opponents ought to have very good reason for doing so, in my view. Friendly leaks at least do not involve betrayal, but they do tend to undermine the role of Parliament and act as a mechanism for disciplining journalists so as to tame them for the government.
But this is not the point at issue in the Green affair. As I have argued before, there is a crucial distinction between the standard of propriety to be applied to those leaking and those receiving or disseminating leaks. Just because it might be improper for someone to tell me something, it does not follow that once I know I should act as if I did not. And just because it might be proper for the police to arrest a civil servant for leaking, it does not follow that it is proper for the police to arrest an MP that receives those leaks.
We should be careful what we attempt to argue here. We do not need to accept that it is fine for civil servants to leak just because they feel like it in order to argue that it is not alright for the police to arrest an opposition MP for disseminating information that embarrasses the government. We should also keep separate the almost equally important, but different, constitutional principles involved in the police searching a Commons office and the police arresting an opposition MP for being embarrassing. They are both important, but I fear that MPs may become over-focused on the former (which the ordinary public will not understand) to the detriment of the latter.
