Having done the test and fallen squarely into the latter category, I reverse engineered the test to find out the sort of person that they were actually looking for:

The answer was someone as unlike me as it was possible to imagine for all sorts of reasons but I remember one question in particular:

How important is creativity to you in your work?

The answer they wanted was two out of five.

Who actually values creativity this much? I can imagine not valuing it at all – I personally value it a lot – but 2 out of 5? Just enough to realise that it is sometimes important but not so much that you actually want it to be part of your day.

Not that I am saying that civil servants are actually like that at all. What I am saying is that that seems to be what civil service managers’ ideal candidate would be like. It made me think

To be any kind of leaker, apologist for leaks of soft-pedaller on leaks of any kind is to be seen as a counter-cultural rebel, making trouble and threatening the machine. It’s amazing how much disapproval you can attract simply by, say, talking about this Greengate affair in anything but the most condemnatory terms about Chris Galley. Not a good idea in front of bosses. Independent thought? Moral values? As I say, I don’t think you’ve ever been a civil servant!

But what is wrong about being labeled as a whistle blower? It identifies you as capable of independent thought with moral values.

As for exhausting internal processes, that’s easy to say, but you do need to factor into that two things. First, raising a concern like that will ruin your civil service career almost as effectively as being caught leaking will – you’ll be marked as a troublemaker. To be honest, I think from a selfish point of view it’s more rational to take the risk of leaking. Second, doing that makes it possible for the system to stop the leak – they can take original documents, remove e-mails, etc., etc., so the person who genuinely thinks the public has to be told about some scandal may, by raising it internally, give up all power to do so. In the end, “internal processes” can just be a way of allowing the machine to kill the leak and identifying a leaker at the same time. It may sound cynical and paranoid, but years in the civil service make you quite cynical and paranoid about it.

When I was a civil servant I made up my mind I would only leak in extreme circumstances (difficult to say what they are in advance, but an example might have been evidence of ministers colluding in a murder or some bad criminality, or lying to Parliament about some important matter) but if those circumstances came about, I would simply leak, not go through the internal processes designed to stop me.

Does leaking amount to a criminal matter? Not in the general sense. It is however clearly a breach of the conditions of employment.

There is an easy set of steps if you think that (as a Civil Servant or plain Joe Smith) information should be disclosed.

1. Raise a complaint within government. Painful, but possible.

2. If 1 fails, leak. Then trust that you have a valid reason for leaking.

Step 2 is conditional upon step 1. If you haven’t worked through the system, expect little sympathy in the courts.

Clive Ponting was rightly cleared for a clear SOA breach according to earlier laws. Post-Ponting, leakers should go through step 1 and there are very few occasions when a unilateral leak is necessary. If a leak is necessary, it can be defended in spite of the cretinous denial of “public interest” in the OSA.

And keeping “misleading” information in the dark from the people being mislead is the *best* practice we have available?

Civil Servants, today, have much more protection within the service. If a CS observes that parliament is being fed misleading information, s/he can raise that concern internally. Only in extreme circumstances should the CS leak information. Common sense suggests that if a CS is in such a situation, the information should not be leaked to a party buddy.

Do you have sources and actual facts to back up this statement?

Of course we don’t know the nature of all these leaks – Jacqui Smith implies that they must be very serious indeed, involving national security, but this begs other questions.

The Tory party have claimed that the information leaked was not under the official secrets act, and was small fry. Well, in that case the leaker is going to have a difficult time using the moral defence to justify his actions. This moves him from being a leaker of principle, and into the realms of a Tory mole. But was he a paid Tory mole?

Eh? You seem to be conflating several things here. The essential principles are these:
1. did his conduct amount to a criminal offence;
2. was the way in which the investigation has been conducted necessary and proportionate;
3. was there a more reasonable alternative means of resolving this situation?

Of course all Govts suffer leeks, but usually they are career civil servicemen, who after years in the job feel, as a matter of conscience, the need to leek something important. This is not the case in this story. We have a very young man who has been in post for 5 minutes, and has already leaked a number of documents to an opposition front bencher, who just happens to be in the same party as he is.

The Tory party have claimed that the information leaked was not under the official secrets act, and was small fry. Well, in that case the leaker is going to have a difficult time using the moral defence to justify his actions. This moves him from being a leaker of principle, and into the realms of a Tory mole. But was he a paid Tory mole?

The Speaker said police contacted the serjeant at arms, Jill Pay, to request access to search Green’s office.

“I have been told that police did not explain, as they are required to do, that the serjeant was not obliged to consent or that a warrant could have been insisted upon.”

Martin said he “regretted” that the serjeant then signed a consent form without consulting the clerk of the house.

They didn’t

If he had, wouldn’t the police have had to go to a judge to get one and isn’t there a good chance, in light of the above, that the judge would have told them to bugger off.

Stuff parliamentary privilege, I’d like to think that if the police showed up at my office asking to search my desk, my boss would ask to see a warrant. I certainly would if they arrived on my doorstep.

Still, perhaps it has turned out for the best – if this hadn’t happened, any one of the shower of senior police numbskulls involved in this witless decision might have become commissioner of the Met; it seems they’ve all applied.

Some of us seem to think that nobody should have been arrested for doing what Green is alleged to have done; others think that, given the regrettable state of the law, any citizen who asked a civil servant to leak anything at all could reasonably have been arrested by counter terrorist police and have their home and property searched. This seems to be Unity’s position (forgive me if I have misunderstood).

My own position is that it is extremely unlikely that a prosecution for conspiracy to misconduct would result in a prosecution because a court would be very unlikely to interpret the law in this way. From my understanding of the offence currently under investigation, the police have therefore erred in law. Moreover, such a prosecution would obviously be contrary to the public interest (except insofar as it would almost certainly result in the law on misconduct) and, since I understand that the CPS has to take the public interest into account when deciding whether to prosecute, it is unlikely that it would even get to court.

This therefore represents a serious error of judgement on the part of the police and, in my view, on the part of the speaker and sergeant at arms, who should certainly have asked rather tougher questions about the police’s request to search Green’s office because, although MPs are not above the law, the institution of parliament is entitled to a certain degree of additional protection from investigation.

Principle #1 – No one, not even a Member of Parliament is above or outside the law.

That should be a simple enough concept for most but as some seem not quite to have understood thing properly it clearly needs to spelled out that the Palace of Westminster is NOT the ‘land of do as you please’ and ‘parliamentary privilege‘ does not – and never has – conferred any kind of blanket immunity to arrest or prosecution, on MPs nor does it preclude the police entering the House of Parliament in order to pursue their inquiries.

Looking around, I’m not sure anyone has said that MPs should be above the law. What some have said is that when the police took the action they did, they should have only done so on the basis that it was necessary and proportionate, and the thinking about proportionality should have included the unique role MPs play in our society. (Of course we do not know whether or not they did think about that.)

Misconduct in public office may be upheld in this case, but I think most people would contend a widely cast net would catch many offenders, some of whom are likely to be of a higher order of criminal.

I also think the manner by which the events have proceeded should raise the subject of standards in public life to a new height as it is something which sullies the reputation of everyone involved.

So whoever is immediately blamed this is something which won’t easily be forgotten, just like the tanks at Heathrow (to add to the list of police state atrocities), and accumulated impressions of this sort will undoubtedly play a large role in deciding the outcome of the next election.

That fact is something for which we should be grateful. Do you really want a House of Commons full of the same excrement that you find in Italy, where elected politicians hide behind their immunity until the statute of limitations frees them?

When UK politicians reveal “secret” information, they should be judged in the same way as you or me. Does the disclosure serve the public interest? If information is received that solely serves a party interest, MPs should report it to the police or shut down their brains (not difficult, I agree).

It is actually better for society if MPs have to demonstrate “public interest” for their leaks. It means that you and I have the same defence if we do the same thing.