I am in favour of open government, but still I can’t help thinking we were better off in the days before our secret services officially existed. We would at least have been spared Dame Stella Rimington’s gold-embossed spy novels and the sight of Sir John Sawers, the new head of MI6, on Facebook, in his swimming trunks, throwing a Frisbee on a West Country beach.

Is there anyone left in power sensible and grown-up enough to realise that while plastering yourself over social networking sites is fine if you are under 25, it is acutely embarrassing for the middle-aged? Tony Blair started the rot, although perhaps one couldn’t expect anything better from an overgrown teenager who wore jeans and claimed to be a fan of rap. Gordon Brown got what he deserved when he announced his House of Commons reforms on YouTube. I wish, though, we could briefly reintroduce public execution for whoever it was who advised the Queen to set up a MySpace account.

As should have been obvious, anyone can set up a page under the name Elizabeth Windsor, as indeed have a number of drag artistes. Scrolling through hundreds of them, I am not sure which page is the Queen’s official one, if indeed it hasn’t been taken down. But I am fairly sure it is not the one that has an edited photograph of Her Majesty apparently smoking a spliff in bed.

Maybe Sir John was hoping to communicate with his adversaries. There are 61 Facebook users calling themselves Ernst Blofeld. But he is wasting his time: you can tell they are not genuine by such statements as “Ernst Blofeld has seven friends”. Who, apart from Kim Il Sung, could they possibly be?

For the middle-aged, putting yourself on Facebook is the online equivalent of holding a disco to celebrate your 50th birthday or walking around with your backside hanging over your belt. It is a pathetic attempt to get with it. As for Stephen Fry’s passion for Twitter, I do hope he is being paid a very hefty fee for marketing the thing.

Presumably, Blair, Brown, Cameron and all the other celebrity enthusiasts think they are showing the common touch by using social- networking sites. But they should stop to consider what history will make of them. Presumably Harold Wilson thought he was being up-to-date when he put on a Gannex raincoat — but who recalls him as a trendsetter these days?

It could have been worse, I suppose: Wilson could have invited the press to Downing Street to watch him working out with a Hula Hoop. Any politician thinking of subscribing to the fashion of the day should forget it. For your own sake, get off Facebook and get a proper website.

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