Presumably, by this sort of thinking, a journalist wouldn’t publish leaked documents - in fact even hand them back to the authorities - because they might weaken a government or undermine trust between ministers and their civil servants.
The artificial but nonetheless noisy furore among Labour politicians, and in some cases my colleagues, over Sir Christopher Meyer’s DC Confidential, shows journalists in a strange light.
Some have spun to all points on the moral compass in their indignation at the Meyer revelations, apparently blind to the irony of otherwise hungry reporters defending a government’s right to protect itself from embarrassment.
Mock anger at a retired civil servant publishing some of the juiciest titbits of modern times – most of them much more significant than Tony Blair’s choice of "ball crushingly tight" corduroys – obscures the real gain from Meyer’s openness: a ringside seat in the run up to a controversial war which is still going on.
This is real history in real-time, written right now, not when the 30-year rule has expired and the consequences have had time to mellow in our memories.
Thanks to Meyer, Robin Cook, the leaked Downing Street memos, the flawed but ultimately revelatory work of The New York Times and the deeply flawed but explosive work of Andrew Gilligan and the BBC, we know more about the run up to war, how the case was made and the job executed than we would otherwise.
The Hutton Inquiry may be the antidote to investigative journalism but it revealed more than the original BBC story about the workings in Whitehall. Hutton and the too-subtle-but-excoriating Butler report into the conduct of ministers and the intelligence apparatus are at their best great pieces of contemporary history - and journalism.
We owe all of them - Judith Miller of the New York Times included - a debt of gratitude for the vast amount of information that has emerged whether by hard work, carelessness or betrayal. In Miller’s case, what she didn’t write - about the White House leak of a CIA agent’s name - will prove longer lasting than the stories she ran with in the run up to war about weapons of mass destruction and the threat from Iraq.
To say that Sir Christopher Meyer has breached the trust of his former role as one of Britain’s most respected diplomats is specious. Mocking Blair’s trousers, Cherie’s hairdresser and John Prescott’s ignorance of the "Balklands" is pretty gentle stuff compared with the deep, dark official secrets Meyer has kept and will keep from his long history as a trusted diplomat and Downing Street staff member.
Most of what he says about the prelude to war in Iraq in the book is opinion: Blair could have, might have, ought to have read more, done more, pushed Bush harder.
The real secrets lie buried, not as the Downing Street machine has now suggested because he was excluded, but in fact because he knows where to draw the line between good anecdotes and national security.
Meyer is no underhand secret leaker of information designed to damage the state, a politician or a rival. Surely the real damage is from those at the centre of power who leak lines like Gordon Brown being "psychologically flawed", not someone who writes openly of an important historical and personal period and has it cleared by the Cabinet Office?
Remember, this is a diplomat who served Britain in Moscow in almost impossible circumstances and who was an honest Civil Service press secretary to John Major - that most embattled Prime Minister - in the days before the Labour spin doctors took over the Downing Street press office.
Remember, before you join the attack on Meyer, that he was effectively the last press secretary or spokesman for the Prime Minister not to be politically appointed. They were days when the Downing Street spokesman didn’t so much spin as draw gentle smokescreens across the less attractive parts of government policy or its failings. They, particularly Meyer and his deputy, could be pompous, deliberately obscure, or downright hostile, but they did it from the position of civil servants, not party men.
I was in the parliamentary lobby when Meyer was press secretary. While he lacked the aura of conspicuous and bulletproof honesty which cloaked his predecessor Gus O’Donnell, now Cabinet Secretary and a critic of civil servants publishing their memoirs ( which one can take as a gentle and expedient swipe at Meyer), Meyer took on the rough and tumble of the lobby with humour and intelligence and candour.
With Gus, now Sir Gus, you knew you were talking to someone who understood and was so close to Major that you might as well be talking to the prime minister himself. It was a relationship almost as close, yet less manipulative, as the incredible double act between Alastair Campbell and Blair. Meyer was more detached from Major, but no less supportive in what now seems an almost archaically Civil Service sort of way.
The idea that Meyer briefed Major while the Prime Minister was in his Y-fronts is funny and conjures countless Steve Bell cartoons of Major with his underpants outside his trousers; but is also evidence of Major’s candour and the closeness Meyer managed to build with a man a million miles away from him in the British class system.
This is Meyer’s skill. He may be a bit vain and like the sound of his voice but he is basically a good guy with a great mind who has devoted himself to public service.
He wears red socks (a 1980s sort of idiosyncratic gesture designed to keep him in the memory of those he meets, but nevertheless one that works), he can ride in the ambassadorial Rolls-Royce through Washington like a pasha, but he is essentially grounded, partly through his wife Catherine - despite them being known as Fred and Ginger on the Washington circuit.
Meyer may like the trappings of being connected - the Roller in Washington, the first-name banter with Condi Rice, the knighthood - but he has spent a lifetime preparing himself for service at the highest levels of intellectual and public service achievement. He may be more colourful but he is at heart a classic British civil servant – a creature badly ignored if not destroyed by the two Labour governments.
Talk to diplomats in the field about the late Robin Cook and you get the picture. The Foreign Office gently mocked him as "Mr A4" because he wouldn’t read more than a single page briefing. Abroad he almost always treated the diplomatic staff in the country with disdain, leaving the clear impression - usually wrongly - that he knew more about places like the Balkans or the Indian subcontinent than they did. He was pompous on a scale Douglas Hurd could only have dreamed about, but without the old Etonian confidence to make you think it was somehow well placed.
The new Labour of 1997 loathed civil servants and the diplomats sent abroad to further Britain’s interest.
Labour forgot a crucial tenet of British life that politicians come and go but a genuinely independent Civil Service goes on. Meyer understands that, and also that the nature of the relationship between government and the Civil Service has changed forever - not because of his book but because Labour has politicised so many appointments.
It is a huge credit to former cabinet secretary Sir Robin Butler that he managed to prevent a wholesale conversion of the Civil Service to a system of political patronage - outside Downing Street at least.
Blair and Campbell were right to try to reform the Civil Service and understandably suspicious of many of the mandarins who had served a Conservative government for almost 20 years. But Meyer is not the first, and nor will he be the last, civil servant to realise that history is the here and now - not the distant past. (Sir Peter de la Billiere’s 1991 Gulf War memoir was far more scathing and should have been listened to).
Meyer does no discredit to his mission to serve the Queen and Britain by revealing a little of what he knows. We would be the poorer without it in this fast-moving media world.
He supported ridding Iraq of Saddam. What Meyer questions is whether Blair used the leverage he could have had over President Bush to secure a more intelligent and successful outcome to a war which, while difficult to sell, seemed necessary.
The Meyer book seems more of a cautionary tale and more of a hint at what lay behind the rush to war than the real story. The revelations of the corduroy trousers and the political pygmies in the Cabinet are a sideshow. I suspect there is more to come from Chris Meyer at a time when he feels he can really unburden himself of the secrets he holds, but as a good civil servant he will wait until that time is right.
- Peter Bale is the Online Editorial Director of Times Online
- Sir Christopher Meyer's DC Confidential is available from Times Online Books first
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